Doctors Fail To Process
Claims Over Internet

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - While the percentage of physicians using computers and the Internet has steadily increased in recent years, few have yet to embrace the Web for administrative functions, according to a new study by the American Medical Association (AMA).

Only 8% of US doctors polled by the AMA last June to September say they use the Web for health insurance claims processing. Physicians' least frequent reasons for using the Web also include obtaining or transferring medical records (17%) and obtaining insurance or managed care data (13%).

Only one in four doctors use the Web to send and receive e-mails to patients. In addition, 26% of physician Web users say they currently have a Web site, about the same proportion as in 1999.

The findings are in sync with other recent surveys suggesting that doctors are beginning to integrate computers into their practices and see online administrative functions as essential to the future of their practices, but remain skeptical about online interactions with patients.

The survey is based on interviews with 1,001 physicians and is the AMA's third analysis of physicians' online behavior.

Fifty-one percent of respondents acknowledged the usefulness of the Web to access drug information, an 8 percentage-point gain from 1999.

Among physician Web users, Medline was most frequently mentioned (20%) as one of the sites they've visited in the past 3 months, followed by WebMD (10%), Medscape (8%) and the AMA Web site (7%).

Overall, 75% of doctors surveyed say they are computer users, up from 42% in 1997, the first year of the survey. The percentage of Web users also rose sharply, to 70% of doctors in 2000 from 20% in 1997.

Reference Source 89

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