That's one of the reasons that the licensure issue has been driven as it has by the radiologists. The Healthcare Informatics Pulse, sponsored by IBM, presents market intelligence collected using a variety of survey methods. A survey conducted among attendees at the Healthcare Financial Management Association conference in June garnered the following results. Physicians, angered by inaccurate Web content and pushed by payors to make disease management pay, are slowly catching on to using the Internet as a care-communications medium rather than letting their patients roam through cyberspace unguided. But the current Web market is still a vast spread.
Some companies focus on secure doctor-patient messaging.
Others facilitate a patient-created health record to which a physician can be granted access. Still others start with the physician-generated record and allow online patient access. And truckloads of sites offer push or pull content on diseases and wellness. Both patients and doctors can visit a secure server to exchange data and messaging, but content choices are in the doctors' hands. Specialists get ticked off when a woman walks in with 900 pages she has printed off from Internet sites saying what kinds of treatment she should be having.