Cost-effective clinical uses of wide-area networks: electronic mail as telemedicine.

Abstract

Electronic mail (E-mail) is widely used as a means of communication in the medical community. E-mail is clearly inexpensive when compared to two-way, fully interactive, real-time, video telemedicine. By content analysis of 200 consecutive messages, we show E-mail to be a low-cost use of computer networks, supporting a wide range of physician decision-making.