E-mail access between doctor and patient is the most popular online service that the Group Health Cooperative provides its members, Maureena Moran told health information managers and directors here Sunday.

The group gathered at Group Health's corporate headquarters in Seattle for one of hundreds of sessions planned at the annual American Health Information Management Association convention and exhibit.

Moran, executive director of Web services for Group Health, said there were no models to look at and plenty of naysayers when Group Health began to build its online services back in 2000.

"Some said, 'Oh, my older patients won't use that,'" Moran said. "Yeah, they do."

Today 49.9 percent of Group Health members use the services, deemed by Moran to be more extensive than those of any other health organization in the country.

"There is no one that is doing the full access that we have," she said.

Diana Gehring, HIM director at Southern Coos Hospital in Bandon, Ore., said her hospital would find it difficult to achieve the level of online services Group Health has, mostly because of the lack of resources.

Richard M. Wicker, HIM director at Shore Hospital, a 225-bed acute care hospital in Somers Point, N.J., agreed, but said Group Health might serve as a model for migrating some services to the Web.