E-mail Communication in the OB/GYN Office: Analysis of Patient E-mails to Their OB/GYN
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: How patients use e-mail with their obstetrician-gynecologists (ob/gyns) is unknown. E-mail was originally created as a tool for health care professionals yet physicians remain reluctant to adopt e-mail as a form of communication with patients. Many cite concerns of patient misuse, risk management issues, and uncompensated time commitment. The primary objective of this study was to examine the details of e-mail generated by patients to their ob/gyns. A secondary objective was to examine e-mails that corroborate physician concern about e-mail. Methods: A retrospective observational study was performed. E-mails from patients sent to two ob/gyns were examined. Results: Three hundred patient initiated e-mails were generated by 127 patients. Seventy-eight percent were sent during office hours and 87% of e-mails were sent on weekdays. Thirty-seven percent involved symptoms, 14% test results, 13% administrative, 12% contraception, 11% prescriptions, 8% other and 5% social. Three percent of e-mails met the definition of misuse. There were 594 follow-up e-mails exchanged from the initial 300 e-mails. Each physician received up to 6 e-mails daily. Conclusions: Patients use e-mail as an alternative to calling. More than 50% of e-mails relate to symptoms and test results. This study substantiated concerns about e-mail misuse by patients. New policies must be created to ensure that e-mail with patients is safe, effective and attractive for physicians as a form of communication with patients. J Clin Gynecol Obstet. 2014;3(1):8-13 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jcgo232e
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".