If the patient wants a direct email, can you send them a standardized email that they send back stating they know it is not secure or encrypted, but they are OK with that?
Hey Bert, sorry, I missed this question earlier...
This is totally up to the practice. We do have some customers who email patients just because that's what their patients want. Most of them either get the patient to sign a form in the office stating that they understand email is not secure, or they include a big warning in the signature of their emails. We've seen less and less of this though, and even our customers who have been doing this for years have recently been switching to the portal.
As we expand portal functionality, the messaging option in the portal gets more interesting as you start to be able to do things like actually charge the patient a small fee for the conversation back and forth.
