At home, especially if you share a computer with your spouse or kids, e-mail from your doctor may wind up on a screen everybody can see. In between, in the vastness of cyberspace, your e-mail is vulnerable to busybodies hacking their way. Be careful if you fill out any medical forms on line, or otherwise divulge personal medical information, too. Make sure there's a lock icon in the lower left corner, which means whoever has designed the form has included encryption, says Rippen. Even with these precautions, be careful about discussing sensitive information such as psychiatric problems, HIV status, abortion decisions or disability claims on interactive web sites or by e-mail.
Doctors appear more reluctant.
In part, this is because doctors fear that answering patients' e-mail will take them time and pay nothing. That's true, but even so, it may be worth it, some say. He found that it takes only four minutes, on average, to read and respond to an e-mail and that most can be answered within 48 hours. To help doctors cope with the inevitable growth of patient e-mail, Dr. David Stern, an internist at the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of Michigan Health System, is studying more than 50 young doctors. Half of them will communicate with patients only in traditional ways, and half will add e-mail to their interactions, and he'll compare the outcomes.