My staff monitors our yahoo email and will copy an email from a patient and paste it into a message attached to their chart and send it to me. I will answer the email, copy my response. Right click on the patients name and open the email from the drop down. This creates an outlook express email to the patient (which autopopulates their email address from demographecs page), I paste my reponse into the message window and send. Then I save the whole message with my response to the chart. The staff has trained themselves to always check the demographic page and enter the patients email address before they send the message to me.
I love this option to answer patient's questions. It is a huge time saver and most of the patients keep it short and sweet. It eliminates phone tag and saves time for my staff as well ( staff time=salary dollars).
