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Email for the provision of information on disease prevention and health promotion

Email is widely used in many sectors of society and many people now use email regularly. The use of email in health care is however less common. One possible use of email in healthcare is for health professionals to use it to send patients information on disease prevention and health promotion. In a systematic review published by the Cochrane Collaboration, Prescilla Sawmynaden and colleagues examined how patients, healthcare professionals and health services may be affected by using email in this way. They reported that there was limited evidence on the effects of using email to give people information on disease prevention and health promotion. Consequently, they were unable to properly assess email’s impact on patient behaviours & actions. As there is a lack of good quality evidence for whether email can be used by healthcare professionals to provide information to patients on disease prevention and health promotion, Sawmynaden and colleagues concluded that future studies should consider how to get good measurable information on this area. 

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