Two such categories most useful for neurologists are electronic communication and knowledge bases, which easily fill needs that remain difficult with nonelectronic media. Electronic mail has revolutionized professional communication. Professional directories and stationery now commonly include e-mail addresses and Web sites. An e-mailing list of neurologists 2 brings them together from all over the world. E-mail is increasingly entering clinical care.
Patients can contact physicians, their staff, or even prospective physicians through e-mail.
This may increase the involvement of patients in supervising and documenting their own health care, and contribute to improved health, but may also assist in hypochondriacal pursuits. The guidelines also address effective clinician-patient communication and medicolegal matters. Web forums and chat rooms are Internet versions of more traditional electronic bulletin boards, many of which allow unrestricted, worldwide anonymous access by all users. Real-time multimedia electronic communication is increasingly used in neurology. It can be relatively prosaic, such as sharing radiology images between hospitals, or it can involve multimodality remote-control examination of a patient in a rural area by a physician who is in a university medical center hundreds of miles away.