Online dialogue between healthcare providers and patients can help to educate patients and make them more satisfied, researchers say.

Online dialogue between healthcare providers and patients can help to educate patients and make them more satisfied, researchers publishing a small provisional study this week in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making concluded.

The researchers, based in Denmark, created a health informatics tool–The Online Patient Book–to enable asynchronous, written online communication between healthcare professionals and their patients: men with prostate cancer treated with surgery in a short-stay hospital setting. The patients would use the tool to write messages to their providers, and were promised a response within 24 hours. Evaluation of the tool ran from June 2010 to September 2010.

Overall, 33 out of 34 patients who used the tool considered their experience a positive one, with one patient giving a neutral evaluation of the tool. They indicated that the tool gave them a sense of freedom and a « feeling of security, » knowing they could get their providers’ attention as necessary, while not being tied down to any particular time or place to meet. » (…)

Read more: Online communication tool empowers patients – FierceHealthIT http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/online-communication-tool-empowers-patients/2012-09-05#ixzz26LrL7qZy

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