Connected health provides a novel way of delivering care. Instead of relying exclusively on episodic encounters in a practice or hospital, connected health leverages advances in communications technology to create a high-bandwidth information exchange between patient and provider. This enables new processes, such as remote patient monitoring, secure messaging, and telehealth. Its promise is that providers can better care for patients when more closely connected to them, including during the large parts of their lives when patients are not in examining rooms or inpatient beds (1).

Achieving this promise, however, requires getting past the operational demands connected health places on providers. Although remote patient engagement is often assumed to be a substitute for time-consuming face-to-face visits, in recent studies we found just the opposite: Patients introduced to a portal allowing them to send secure messages to their care team had more rather than fewer face-to-face visits (2). Once patients began using the portal, many started sharing health updates and new symptoms. Such messages could not be ignored by the care team and thus created not only more work but also additional office visits.

中文翻译：

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技术和医学：将提供者的访问重新想象为新的三级护理

互联健康提供了一种新颖的护理方式。互联医疗不是仅依靠诊所或医院中的突发事件，而是利用通信技术的先进性来在患者和提供者之间创建高带宽信息交换。这将启用新的过程，例如远程患者监视，安全消息传递和远程医疗。它的承诺是，提供者可以在与患者建立更紧密的联系时更好地照顾他们，包括在他们一生的大部分时间里，当患者不在检查室或住院床位时（1）。

但是，要实现这一诺言，就需要超越与提供者的健康场所相关的运营需求。尽管通常认为远程患者参与可以代替耗时的面对面访问，但在最近的研究中，我们发现了相反的情况：将患者引入门户网站后，他们可以向其护理团队发送安全消息，而不仅仅是较少的面对面拜访（2）。一旦患者开始使用门户，许多人就开始共享健康更新和新症状。这样的信息不能被护理团队所忽略，因此不仅增加了工作量，还增加了上门服务的时间。