Direct E-Mail

[jamiepec]

Looking for opinions on the direct email setting. We are looking to set this up to communicate with our referring providers to share medical records. Does it work well? Are there any compatibility issues?
Also - the patient portal...Can we use this to send patients their medical photos (when they request) and other documents from their record?

[friscoeyeassociates]

As I have been led to understand, Direct E-Mail is only possible if both parties use a direct email address... "Direct" is a confusing term because it does not necessarily allude to the fact that it is an entirely different email platform than normal Email, but it is.. To me "Direct" seems like it would be referring to an email that uses your direct domain like [e-mail] vs say a gmail account for example. But this is not what Direct Email is referring to. Instead "Direct" email refers to a more secure email protocol altogether, which encrypts the message on both ends, and requires multiple layers of identity management vs the single layer used in the most common email services. This extra level of protection is to protect sensitive PHI.

At the current time, I find that most other clinicians we co-manage patients with do not have a direct email address. In fact I don't think any of them do. Our office actually has one through CPM, and it has never been used... I think over the next few years it will become more and more ubiquitous as we move into the next phase of government oversight, but right now my recommendation would probably not to jump in yet... Mostly because you would be swimming around by yourself until everyone else catches up in a year or two.

To answer the second part of your question - Yes, you can absolutely use the patient portal for these documents, and actually for some of the rules governing Meaningful Use it is required that you do so.. For example, last year for Meaningful Use stage 2 it was a requirement for I think 50% of patients to have access to an exam summary when they leave your office after an exam, either in hand or available online. We utilized the online portal to meet this requirement by uploading every patient's exam summery to their portal.

Hope this helps!

[erica]

To add to this and an alternative to direct email, you can create an authorized user for the patient portal. This would allow you to give the other provider their own username/password for that specific patient's portal...which in turn gives them access to any files you upload to their portal like their medical records, reports, photos etc.
In Patient->Files->Online Portal (Add/Remove Files) you can toggle to Authorized Web Users.