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.