Giving Email Addresses to Patients Who Don’t Have Them

In my post, 4 Things Your Patient Portal Should Include, I talked about the thing patients want most in a patient portal is the ability to communicate with someone in the physician office. I still think that’s the most powerful part of a patient portal.

In response to that post, the people at Engaged Care sent me an interesting way that they’re approaching engaging the patient. Their efforts are focused on those patients who don’t have an email address. Check out this video which demonstrates the workflow they offer.

I’m not sure how many patients don’t have an email address, but this is a pretty slick solution to get them signed up for an email address. The other challenge is getting those patients who don’t have an email address motivated and skilled enough to check the newly created email as well. However, maybe access to a well done patient portal might be motivation enough for them to get involved.

The other benefit to these physician provided email addresses is that they are secure. You might remember that native email is not HIPAA secure. The email addresses that Engaged Care provides are HIPAA secure.

I’ll be interested to see how this company does. How many patients actually use the new email addresses and where they take it next. Although, I found the idea of giving patients a secure email address quite interesting.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

5 Comments

  • John,

    Retail chain stores badly want email addresses from their customers, and even badger them at checkout to try and convince them to cough one up. Granted, retail is far less pressing in terms of benefits to a customer then the medical provider’s ability to better inform their patients, so the approach in the video does have a chance of convincing people who don’t have an email address to take one for this purpose – but if the person is able to take one, odds are they have one already and don’t want to cough it up, nor is it likely they will monitor the new email address.

    Also, many people these days don’t have computers – especially some seniors, nor would they use a computer if you gave them one. They don’t like technology. And even more people want to stay as much off the grid as they can. People who barely consent to give you a home phone number, pay in cash and maybe don’t even have cell phones want nothing to do with anything they feel lets companies or government monitor what they are doing. Are they paranoid? Maybe, but after the NSA and related scandals they are digging in even more.

    Of course, for MU, email addresses are important. But in pushing portal access and getting email addresses (or creating them), it is critical that patients be made to understand that their data is secure, that they need a separate password for the portal then what they use for other services, and that nothing usable will be sent by email (given how often email accounts are broken into), and that the medical provider has adequate security. Plus they need to understand why this is good for them. And if they are computer phobic then nobody, including the doctor, should be arm-twisting them into any of this.

  • I think you’d be surprised how easily people will give up their email addresses to their doctors. It’s not hard at all. Some will decline, but most will be fine with it.

    As for the seniors, more of them do email than you think. Plus, those that don’t won’t use the email, but that doesn’t matter because their caregiver (son or daughter often) will. So, the service still works with their caregiver doing the electronic stuff for them.

  • You are quite right about seniors; they are a mixed bag, and some happily let their children deal with email issues. Personally, my mother (83) used to do a bit of email; now she won’t even touch an IPAD – while my in-laws, who barely understand computers, constantly use them for anything and everything. One has to be sensitive, and ask the ‘can your children handle it for you’ question if appropriate.

    I am curious as to how people react to a doctors office versus a store chain. Certainly the Target and like disasters scare people away from giving any info to stores, and the general public hears very little about how bad some medical providers are with security, so they may be easier to convince. If that were to change, if we start seeing newspaper headlines about HIPAA violations (few seem to get that type of attention the way stores and banks do), the attitude would likely change.

    Ron

  • R Troy,
    I think the reason people don’t worry as much about an email to a doctors office vs retail is what the person thinks they’ll get from each. If they give it to Target, what’s the best they could get? Discounts? They think (right or wrong) that a doctors office will send them something useful and only useful things.

  • They are also less likely to think (rightly or wrongly) that the doctor will be selling their email address to anyone, or that the doctor having it will cause them to get even more spam.

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