One of Christopher Crow’s patients was in Miami, about to leave on a week-long cruise, when his prostatitis flared up again. “He e-mailed me from his hotel room to ask for a prescription,” recalls Crow, whose Web site features secure e-mail messaging. “All he had to do was locate the closest drug store and pick up his medicine the next day. Imagine how difficult it would have been for him, trying to get an appointment with a doctor in a strange city before his ship sailed.”
Crow practices at Family Medical Specialists of Texas (FMST) in Plano, a Dallas suburb. Crow says that the three-physician practice’s Web site, www.fmstexas.com, attracts new patients and helps make the practice far more efficient.
The same goes for the Office of Orthopaedic Medicine and Surgery, a three-physician practice in Washington, D.C. As patients leave after an appointment, they are handed cards with the practice’s Web address (www.dcorthodocs.com) printed on the front and their diagnosis written on the back. “We’ve just upgraded our Web site,” explains Latisha Harrison, the practice’s marketing director. “Now it’s more interactive, and patients can submit forms to us online. We also added an educational guide so now our patients can look up reliable information about their specific condition. Our doctors were really, really adamant about including that feature in the upgrade.”
These physicians are among the early adopters of Web-based technologies for medical practices, although many more are likely to follow their example. In today’s wired world, patients want the same level of service online from their physicians that they already routinely receive from companies selling them books, music, and camping gear.
“Absolutely everyone should have a practice Web site,” says practice management consultant Judy Capko. “It’s a very reasonable investment, and it makes you more visible, not only to your existing patients, but also to people who are searching for a new physician in the area.”
About three-quarters of U.S. adults would like to schedule their doctor visits via the Internet, and they’d appreciate e-mail reminders from their doctors, according to a recent Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive poll. But only a tiny minority of medical practices offer such services, resulting in a paltry 4 percent of patients using them. Moreover, roughly two-thirds of patients would like to receive their lab results via e-mail, but only 2 percent currently do. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the practices that invest in these IT offerings will be at an advantage in the healthcare delivery marketplace.
Your billboard on the Web
Some practice Web sites present basic information about the practice, including short biographies of each physician, directions to the office, and forms patients can download and complete at home before arriving for scheduled visits. Other sites boast more sophisticated features, such as Crow’s secure e-mail and gastroenterologist Patricia Raymond’s Web movies.
When patients visit Raymond’s site (www.simplyscreening.com), they find personalized videos available for viewing. Raymond, a solo practitioner in Chesapeake, Va., meets about two-thirds of her patients for the first time when they arrive for procedures. “The videos show me chatting in my living room, answering their most common questions,” explains Raymond. “My patients love them, and the Web site has streamlined getting new patients in for their colonoscopies.”
The specific mix of features your Web site should incorporate depends on the nature of your individual practice. A primary-care practice in which new patients are seeking long-term relationships with a physician should probably use its Internet presence to introduce its physicians and share some personal information about them. A specialty practice such as gastroenterology should focus more on the specific procedures it performs. Most physician practices start out with a basic Web site and then add new features over time as they perceive demand for them.
One way to think about your Web site is to envision it in three developing stages, says Bruce Kleaveland, president of Kleaveland Consulting in Seattle. In the first stage, you offer a basic introduction to your practice. Then, as you expand the site and enter the second stage, you add administrative functions such as giving patients the ability to make appointments, pre-register, and complete downloadable forms. The third stage involves incorporating clinical interactions with patients, such as prescription refill requests and access to secure e-mail communication between physicians and patients.
At this stage, you’ll be handling sensitive patient information, and so you must ensure your site is secure. To do so, employ the services of a company that offers encrypted e-mail messaging. When these companies receive a message from you, they then send e-mail messages to your patients. To access the messages, patients must have user names and passwords. These sites afford the same level of security as do financial services Web sites, such as banks.
At this point, you may also want to set up a process to handle online clinical requests. If your practice has linked an EMR to your Web site, you can automatically call up a patient’s record, which you can view in conjunction with the request. In this case, responding to patients is so easy, physicians can do so with just a few clicks of a mouse. Paper-based practices that agree to field online requests may have to assign a nurse to screen and respond to basic clinical questions such as prescription refills and lab results. The nurse can forward more complex requests to a physician.
Turbo-charged Web sites
The Web site for PeaceHealth Medical Group (PHMG), a 120-physician group in Eugene, Ore., exemplifies the sophisticated features a large practice can offer its patient base. This secure Web site (www.peacehealth.org) is available only to patients who have received a personal password. It gives patients the capability to schedule, reschedule, and cancel appointments; view and download lab results from current and previous visits; and exchange secure e-mail messages with their physicians.
