Do You E-mail Your Doctor?

I am a huge fan of e-mail, and of the Web in general.

I would rather e-mail friends for routine things than call, and even for not-so-routine things, like giving bad news about my cancer, I often prefer to e-mail.

Only a dozen people or so have my cell phone number, and I like it that way. In fact, it's getting to be time to get a new number, to again limit the number of people who can reach me day or night, awake or asleep, well or not well.

My home phone is the number I give everyone else, and that phone is turned off unless I am expecting a phone call from someone who doesn't have the cell number. I check the voice mail once a day, that's enough.

So it's probably no surprise when I say I prefer to e-mail my doctors.

Dr. Livingston, now in Tucson, gave me his e-mail address years ago, and told me it was fine to contact him that way. My radiation oncologist, Dr. Eulau, and I also e-mail occasionally.

Dr. Lee, my new medical oncologist, told me when I asked if I could e-mail him that it was a HIPAA violation and that he doesn't e-mail with patients.

Some other day, I'll get to the bottom of the HIPAA thing, but for today, I'm wondering how many of you e-mail your doctors?

Add a comment, or send me an e-mail: jeanne.sather@gmail.com

Or if you always call your doctor, and prefer to do it that way, tell me that too.

Waiting for the Phone to Ring
There are at least two problems with communicating with a doctor by phone:

1. The gatekeepers between you and the doctor.

2. The amount of time you (I) spend waiting by the phone for a return call--and sure enough, after waiting for three or five hours, I pick up the phone to a call that I DON'T want, just in time to send the important call from the doctor's office to voice mail. In that case, the game starts all over again at square one.

So, here's how it usually goes:

Call to Gatekeeper No. 1: The receptionist. I tell her what the problem is, and she passes me on to the doctor's nurse.

Call to Gatekeeper No. 2: The nurse. In theory, nurses are supposed to be able to handle many calls from patients without "bothering" the doctor. In practice, this usually means explaining the problem a second time, and then waiting for a call back.

Call FROM the Doctor. Sometimes the return call is from the doctor, at some odd hour when he or she returns phone calls (and I am usually asleep). Sometimes it is from the nurse, relaying the doctor's answer to my question.

More often than not, if the call-back is not from the doctor, I get the answer to a different question than the one I asked. It's like playing that child's party game of telephone.

With e-mail: I write my question. I have time to review my question to make sure it's clear, and then I send it. The doctor answers my question whenever he has a spare moment in his busy schedule, and no one wastes any time playing phone tag or leaving incomprehensible voice mail messages. (Believe me, I've been guilty of that.)

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

Comments

[Lisa]

I totally agree. I email 2/3 of the essential members of my medical team and it is great. I email the question ie my foot is now numb when I exercise- and they answer. My ortho oncologist about whom I love everything except this- doesn't prefer to email. Except when I emailed her pictures of my healing skin graft and its subsequent deterioration during radiation, aside from that no emails. So, we have been playing phone tag all week about my darn numb foot and it stinks.

[jeanne]

Lisa-I'm so sorry to hear about your foot, and glad you agree with me about e-mailing.

I rarely keep track of how much time I spend either on hold or waiting for phone calls any more--because I can't stand to know the truth.

I did keep track on most of the Tykerb phone calls though, and I'm going to get that post up tomorrow.

Seems pretty clear the mail-order pharmacy, which is apparently owned by a drug company, did everything it could to delay mailing my drug.

Sometimes I am just too naive.

[Lisa]

Yeah, numb foot stinks. I wrote about it the other day.

http://1goodfoot.blogspot.com/2007/11/numb-foot.html

The pharmacy thing with the Tykerb sounds pretty stinky, not that the medication sounds fun eiter.

Cheers

[Gloria]

I email one of my docs, Teri Brentnall at U.W., and I love that avenue of communication. My other doctors, including my gynecological oncologist, don't email. I wish they all did.

[Amy]

My husband emails about non emergency matters; and I have too on the rare occasion that he was too foggy and sick, and I needed to figure out what if anything to do with him. I love email. I think all writers do.

[Bob]

Bob, who works for a Chicago company that sells products that he says allow doctors and patients to e-mail in a HIPAA-compliant manner, posted a comment here.

He says that e-mail needs to be encrypted "at a minimum of an SSL 128 level." And adds, "The problem is most people aren’t sure exactly how to encrypt an e-mail."

I have deleted the rest of his comment, which was an advertisement for his company and its products. I don't allow anyone to promote their products or services on my blog.

Jeanne