The Plight of Innovation in Medical Practice: Secure Messaging

Many of you may have wondered why healthcare does not use certain technologies that other industries adopted years or decades ago. One big reason is that if some technology is not implemented properly, people may be permanently harmed or even die.

Secure email has been around for several decades, and was integrated into Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in the last several years. Most healthcare institutions, however choose not to use it because many medical issues cannot be addressed by an email or text message. We fear that it may result in patient harm as we cannot determine in a timely manner between urgent and non-urgent medical problems. The classical example is of a patient who sends a message regarding chest pain symptoms. Chest pain can be due to a number of reasons (e.g. acid reflux, muscle pain) including heart attack, but this diagnosis often needs to be made immediately and cannot wait several hours or days.

Since one of our founding principles is “Innovation,” we want to offer this service to our patients. We believe it will be more convenient for you to send us messages after hours or on weekends when the office is closed. Furthermore, for issues that can be resolved by sending a secure message, we won’t have to play phone-tag during working hours. However, we also need to come to a common understanding on how to use secure messaging that is not only convenient, but also safe.

We are, therefore drafting some initial guidelines. As we grow, we will learn how to use this service better and revise these guidelines accordingly. You can always find the updated guidelines on our website at Guidelines for Secure Messaging.

Another question, which some of you may have is - will my insurance company or I be billed for using a secure message? Some insurance companies do reimburse for using these services, however we feel that there is uncertainty on “what is a billable secure message.” At this point we will NOT be billing for using secure messaging. We will be investigating this opportunity in the future and will update the guidelines when there is more clarification from Medicare and insurance companies.

If you have any suggestions on how to make this service better, please send us feedback at www.avantaclinic.com/contact.