Pilot scheme for 'e-consultation' with your Doctor

[Darren]

Not sure if this is a good idea or not! It's a pilot scheme running in Barcelona soon.

Quote:

Catalans family physicians will communicate with patients via email in the pilot project 'e-consultation, which will begin this quarter at 20 primary care centres (PAC) from Barcelona to facilitate the relationship between the practitioner and the citizen and thus avoid unnecessary travel.

The Deputy Director of Primary Care Catalan Health Institute (ICS), Jaume Benavent, explained that this experience already existed in an "isolated" in some centres, where physicians have provided spontaneously "your email address to communicate with the patient, in the case of any specific monitoring of chronic patients, normal communication of results of any tests or analysis, issue timely consultation of a health or management of an administrative process.

The experience with 20 family physicians, who will undertake to answer the mail within 48 hours, and potentially reach 22,000 users in Barcelona, which has one of the highest rates of Internet access in Catalonia, so which is considered a "good place" to begin, he said.