Desiderata for personal electronic communication in clinical systems

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.