Preferences of interns and residents for E-mail, paging, or traditional methods for the delivery of different types of clinical information.

We elicited from medical house staff their preferences for e-mail and alphanumeric pager as communication channels for the delivery of 18 different types of clinical information about their inpatients. For each type, we calculated the proportion of users who preferred delivery by e-mail, pager, both, or neither (usual delivery). For 14/18 (78%) types, more users preferred delivery by pager than by the other options. For 2/18 (11%) types, e-mail was preferred. For 2/18 (11%) types, more users preferred redundant delivery using both channels. For no types did more users prefer neither, meaning that the information would be delivered by traditional channels, if any. We conclude that medical house staff in the inpatient setting prefer to receive many types of clinical information by pager. The reason may be that they otherwise would have to query clinical information systems for these data, which is wasteful of their time and introduces delays into the process of care. Additionally, we found significant inter-user variability, suggesting that it may be useful for the notification services of an enterprise to employ user profiles for the delivery of clinical information.