Think about how wonderful the ability to send a discharge summary by email to a patient straight from your EMR. I think it’s pretty easy to see the tremendous benefits of this type of communication. Send the patient information to one place they probably visit every day and where they can read and process the information away from the hustle and bustle of the clinic. Certainly many doctors have been doing this with little pamphlets or handout sheets with clinical information. Unfortunately, too many of these sheets never get read. Certainly that same thing could happen with an email, but at least the next generation of patients are going to want this information in their email box.Of course, the problem with sending this information in an email is that email is not secure. Email encryption hasn’t taken hold fast enough to make it encrypted. Is a user’s email box really a secure location where they want their health information? I personally don’t have a problem with it, but I would expect that many people wouldn’t want their health information in their email any more than their regular mailbox. Either way, without the encryption it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to sniff out what’s being sent in an Email containing for example a patient’s discharge. It would be going across the internet in basically plain text.
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