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Can technology help the doctor/patient relationship?

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Today Tara Parker-Pope had a thought provoking column about the strains in the doctor/patient relationship -- and there are some good additional anecdotes and discussion on her blog, Well.

I have maintained for a couple of years that doctors are missing an opportunity to leverage their "trusted brand" (a.k.a the trusted relationship) by embracing basic Internet technologies to communicate more effectively, consistently with their patients.    The simplest example is think of all the information a doctor's office has and needs to distribute to patients -- info about their disease (pamphlet anyone), info about the drugs they prescribe, info about what to do before the procedure,  info about post-visit instructions and so on.    The doctor could "push" this information to the right patients easily -- using a basic CRM type system.   It may not be "personalized" -- but it would be relevant, timely, delivered in a form that patients could use/reuse the information and perhaps learn more, if they chose to in a self-directed way. 

I first learned about "information therapy" and the key role it played in improving outcomes from the founders of Healthwise -- and they are still pursuing this mission, with an expanded set of services.   When you think about -- you want information from the doctor -- and we know from our consumer market research -- the consumers want "trusted information" -- but they also want a lot more than the 2 minutes, shorthand version today's economic model supports in the typical office visit or phone call.

The opportunity is physicians could differentiate their services, extend their reach beyond the office visit and improve the value of their services (and customer satisfaction measures) -- if they could figure out how to deliver "information therapy" or other content they believe in -- to their patients.     If physician offices were like other small/medium sized businesses -- they would have figured out how to do this -- like many successful businesses in other industries have done.

I am sure lots of docs have done some really great things - but why isn't it more widespread?    My hypothesis is -- the economic motivation is not there.   Because of the fee for service, bureaucratic nature of physician reimbursement -- the innovative doc can't capture the incremental value being delivered.    See my previous post on the need for supply side flexibility to stimulate innovation -- this (information therapy, relationship management, brand extension) is precisely the type of service obviously being demanded by consumers -- but is not being 'supplied' by physicians - because they don't have the tools/flexibility to capture the value (or even experiment to find out).

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