Email Hell

I recently started my internship at a large health care provider organization, apparently struggling a bit with its IT system. Conversations with some staff members revealed that excessive emails are one of the many headaches that clinicians and other staff have to manage. Some said they receive upto 300 mails a day, of which at least 50% are unnecessary/FYI emails. Another major category of mails is the "CCed" conversations. One person will send a mail to another, but will add a bunch of names in the CC, "Just to let them know". If the other end replies, he/she will rather "Reply-to-all" than just reply to sender. This circle goes on and on and fills mailboxes and traffic with unnecessary communication, leading to wasted time, traffic, energy, frustration, anger and adversely affects "Job-Do-ability" for everyone.

Gmail has something to offer to health care IT systems ... not a product but a useful concept. By having conversations threads bunched together in a single packet, it reduces a lot of clutter from the inbox and reduces to a great extent the need for opening up that mail thread again and again for every new reply that comes in. This is not a solution to the actual problem which requires an clever email policy, but it does offer a good work around for this problem. Indeed this will require certain technological upgrades and may be a revamping of the email system, but it still seems worth it.

Why this blog

Welcome to my first blog on the web. I love the internet and every new technology associated with it, but till this point, I was able to keep myself away from blogging. I finally got inspired from several people...Dr. John Halamka has been key, whom I had the honor of listening to, during a course on Quality Improvement in Healthcare.

My interest in blogging is to share, ideas/opinions about the systems caring (or not) for our health. Hopefully, as I quote my naive observations, some of you will join in by commenting/discussing and increase our understanding of the issues facing us.