In the year 2010 doctors should be looking at technologies that could help boost their communication with their patients, experts told Healthcare IT News in January.

Thomas J. Handler, MD, research director at Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Inc., predicted that the patient centered medical home was set to heat up in 2010. He said this would bring a focus on improving physician and patient communication, or as he put it “customer relationship management” for lack of a better word.

This could be as easy as using e-mail to get feedback from patients said Handler.

Jay Parkinson, MD, founder of Hello Health, recommended physicians use Watertown, Mass.-based athenahealth. One of its offerings, the athenaCommunicator, provides automated and live communication services between patients and physician practices. Parkinson’s Brooklyn, N.Y.- based practice allows physicians to communicate with their patients using e-mail, IM, video chat and text messaging.

Parkinson’s practice created what William Bria, MD, refers to as a “virtual presence.” Bria, the chief medical information officer at Shriners Hospitals for Children, headquartered in Tampa, Fla., saw technologies that aim to create this type of presence between physicians and their patients as having a big role in the year 2010. He said the country is poised financially and socially to make this happen because of the availability of technologies like the iPhone or smartphone that are capable of providing high quality telecommunication between a physician and a patient.

Parkinson recommended using applications for iPhones, like those from San Mateo, Calif.-based Epocrates, which provides doctors with ways to receive clinical information at the point of care and an app from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) that helps primary care clinicians identify the screening, counseling, and preventive medication services that are appropriate for their patients.

In 2010 every doctor’s office should also be asking if they are going to do electronic visits, said Handler in January.

One course at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, focused on how the “new world order of care" – one that revolves around quality and safety – would be boosted using information technology.  One of its lectures specifically dealt with the use of the e-visit and patient portal strategies and examples.

 “We give demonstrations of various types of electronic visits and the algorithmic approach to building these, but fully integrated with the physician office electronic medical record," said Dan Martich, professor of critical care medicine and chief medical information officer at UPMC.

“We believe that this small aspect of the EMR and telemedicine will connect patients in new and better ways to their care providers for faster and more convenient care,” he said.