Desiderata for Personal Electronic Communication in Clinical Systems
- Affiliation of the authors: Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, New York
- Correspondence and reprints: Justin Starren, MD, PhD, Medical Informatics, VC-5, 622 W. 168th St., New York, NY 10032; e-mail: <starren{at}dmi.columbia.edu>
- Received 15 October 2001
- Accepted 14 January 2002
Abstract
Electronic communication among clinicians and patients is becoming an essential part of medical practice. Evaluation and selection of these electronic systems, called personal clinical electronic communication (PCEC) systems, can be a difficult task in institutions that have no prior experience with such systems. It is particularly difficult in the clinical context. To directly address this point, the authors consulted a group of potential users affiliated with a nationally recognized telemedicine project, to determine important characteristics of a hypothetical PCEC system. They compiled a list of these characteristics and produced a desiderata, or list of desired features, for PCEC systems. Two conventional e-mail implementations and three Web-based PCEC systems were evaluated with respect to the features. The Web-based systems all scored higher than conventional e-mail. It is the hope of the authors that this paper will initiate further discussions about the features of PCEC systems and how to evaluate them.
Footnotes
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This work was supported by cooperative agreement 95-C-90998 from the Health Care Financing Administration, medical informatics training grant LM 07079-09 from the National Library of Medicine, funding from the New York State Office of Science, Technology & Academic Research, and a grant from Lifescan.
