Email for clinical communication between patients/caregivers and healthcare professionals - The Cochrane Library

Email for clinical communication between patients/caregivers and healthcare professionals - The Cochrane Library

Plain language summary

Using email for patients/caregivers and healthcare professionals to contact each other

Email is widely used in many sectors and lots of people use it in their day to day lives. The use of email in health care is not yet so common, although one use for it is for patients/caregivers and healthcare professionals to contact each other. This review examines how patients, healthcare professionals and health services may be affected by using email in this way. We looked for trials examining the use of email for patients/caregivers and healthcare professionals to contact each other and found nine trials with 1733 participants in total.
Eight of the trials looked at email compared with standard methods of communication. Where email was compared to standard methods of communication we found that we could not properly determine what effect email was having on patient/caregiver outcomes, as there were missing data and the results of the different studies varied. For health service use outcomes the situation was the same, but some results seemed to show that an email intervention may lead to an increased number of emails and telephone calls being received by healthcare professionals.
One of the trials looked at email counselling compared with telephone counselling. We found that it only looked at patient outcomes, and found few differences between groups. Where there were differences these showed that telephone counselling leads to greater changes in lifestyle than email counselling.
None of the trials measured how email affects healthcare professionals and only one measured whether email can cause harm. All of the trials were biased in some way and when we measured the quality of all of the results we found them to be of low or very low quality. As a result the results of this review should be viewed with caution.
The nature of the results means that we cannot make any recommendations for how email might best be used in clinical practice. Future research should make allowances for how quickly technology changes, and should consider how much email would cost to introduce and what effect it has on the use of healthcare resources. Research reports should be sure to clearly report their methods and findings, and researchers interested in carrying out research in this area should be assisted in developing ideas and put them into action.