How do physicians interact with current tools, what do they care about?

Stimulating the Adoption of Health Information Technology
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmp0901592

Congress apparently sees HIT — computers, software, Internet connection, telemedicine — not as an end in itself but as a means of improving the quality of health care, the health of populations, and the efficiency of health care systems.

The Impact of the Internet and Its Implications for Health Care Providers: Findings From the First Health Information National Trends Survey
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=766849

As a result, data entry and review systems are becoming ubiquitous in hospital settings and health care technologists are crafting applications in medical informatics to improve the quality of health care.

The implication for physicians is that patients may come into the office with printouts that they did not personally collect; the implication for Web site designers is that health information seekers may be looking for easy-to-print materials to give others.

Those who searched online the most tended to be younger, women, and better educated, and tended to have higher incomes than those who searched the least.

What Does It Cost Physician Practices To Interact With Health Insurance Plans?
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/28/4/w533.full

An approximate calculation can be made by multiplying the number of physicians in U.S. office-based practice by the $68,274 per physician annual cost we found.

Health plans claim to have taken steps to reduce the administrative burden they place on physicians; our data suggest that physicians continue to be discontented with this burden.

The average physician reports spending nearly three weeks per year on these interactions (nearly two weeks if the median value is used); twenty-three weeks per physician per year are spent by nursing staff, and forty-four weeks, by clerical staff.

A small fraction of this time—two hours per year by the average physician, and little more by their staff—is devoted to providing quality data to health plans or to reviewing quality data generated by plans about the physicians’ practice. Primary care physicians, especially those in small practices, spend larger amounts of time interacting with health plans than physicians in other specialties.