According to new data from Manhattan Research (as reported here by iHealthBeat), 36% of US physicians reported that they communicated online with patients in the first quarter of 2008. That’s up from 31% in 2007 and 25% in 2006.

That 11 percentage-point increase is a 44% jump in adoption over two years–a steady rise. It may signal that we’re nearing a tipping point for adoption of a technology that is a foundation of so many effective Ix applications. Secure messaging and other forms of electronic and asynchronous communication make possible so many enhancements to the traditional clinician-patient relationship.

As online communication takes hold, it will be important that delivery systems, technology companies and other organizations develop creative solutions that facilitate the integration of clinicians’ personalized notes/comments/opinions/recommendations with high-quality health content and navigation to additional resources.

The combination of clinician personalization and accurate, comprehensive, understandable and tailored content will allow for mass personalization of Ix. Paul Wallace (IxCenter Board Chair) and I wrote about strategies for doing this in an IxCenter white paper from a few years back that you can download from our Web site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Data, Patient-Clinician Relationship, Secure messaging. Tags: Mass personalization You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.