Email communication between patients and healthcare professionals

Although email is now a very commonly-used method of communication, its use in health care is not yet routine. Email has been used for communication of clinical information between patients and healthcare professionals, but the effects of using email in this way are not known. In a recent review published by the Cochrane Collaboration, Helen Atherton and colleagues assessed the use of email for two-way clinical communication between patients and healthcare professionals. Atherton and colleagues concluded that the evidence was limited it was not possible to adequately assess the effect of email for clinical communication between patients professionals. They advised that future research should take into account the changing nature of technology when designing and conducting future studies and barriers to trial development and implementation should also be tackled. Potential outcomes of interest for future research include clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and use of health services.

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What is the difference between primordial prevention and primary prevention?

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Relevance Over Recall: Rethinking How AI Uses Clinical Data

Our article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine argues that safe and effective AI in healthcare must incorporate mechanisms that emulate human judgement - down-weighting old, inaccurate or superseded information and prioritising what is recent, clinically relevant and reaffirmed - so that AI supports, rather than disrupts, high-quality patient care. Clinicians constantly revise, reinterpret and filter past information so that only what is relevant, accurate and timely shapes present-day management decisions; medical records function as dynamic “working tools” rather than fixed archives. By contrast, many AI systems lack this capacity for selective forgetting and often treat all historical data as equally meaningful. This can lead to outdated or low-confidence diagnoses being repeatedly resurfaced, persistent labels influencing clinical expectations, and irrelevant, long-resolved events cluttering summaries and decision-support outputs. Such indiscriminate recall...

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