A recent trip to my PCP brought with it a surprise: she handed me a registration code for a website called myhealthmychart.com (not really the exact URL) and informed me that we could not communicate through this site. I like this idea a lot better than email, which isn’t secure at all. I also like that I can contact her at any time without worrying that I am going to interrupt whatever she has going on, which makes me much likelier to use the service than I am to use her cell phone number.

As a home visitor with the Nurse Family Partnership, I work with first time new moms, mostly older teens. They seldom use online communication, at least with me, but they do love the text message! I just got a text message from a client today, that said “me and the baby’s father were doing it, and now I am bleeding a bit, do you think the baby is okay?” Although giving nursing advice/opinion by such a shortened electronic form is not ideal, because we were using a nonverbal communication tool, I was able to answer her right away even though I was in a meeting. So there are advantages and disadvantages of adding electronic communication to our patient/client strategies.

Conventional wisdom has branded nurses as somewhat technology avoidant, but I think mostly the problems with nurses and technology have come as a result of systems that are most used by nurses (the early electronic medical record for example) were designed without their input.

A recent study found that over 50% of medical consumers were very interested in using technology to create an online medical record. Clearly this is a trend to keep an eye on. Technology can help solve many communication difficulties, but there are ethical as well as confidentiality concerns to be addressed.