Patients who include their doctor’s name in messages to them are nearly twice as likely to receive a reply as those who do not, a study has found.
Researchers from Harvard University in the US analysed 3.6 million patient messages from more than 511,000 people.
They found that the way people write to their doctor – whether in length, formality, greeting, sentiment or punctuation – played a role in determining whether they received a response.
The findings come as surveys reveal nearly half of Britons do not know their GP’s name.
One 2018 analysis found that just 41 per cent of British adults said they had managed to get an appointment with their doctor in a year.
When they could not see their doctor, 13 per cent said they ignored the problem, leading to five per cent ending up in hospital.
Patients hoping to contact their GP about non-emergency issues are now advised by the health service to fill out a form via the NHS app.
The form is then triaged by the surgery team and patients are supposed to receive either an appointment in person, over the phone, a text message responding to their query or advice to go to a pharmacy or other NHS service, according to the NHS website.
But the new study from the Harvard researchers suggests that the way a message is written – not just its content – could impact how likely it is to be responded to.
Patients who include their doctor’s name in messages to them are nearly twice as likely to receive a reply as those who do not, a study has found (stock photo)
Data from the Mass General Brigham electronic health record system revealed that messages that began by addressing a doctor by name had a response rate of nearly 40 per cent, compared with 26 per cent for those with no such greeting.
Patients for whom English was not their first language, those who were less well-educated and non-white patients were also found to be less likely to have their query replied to.
‘These findings suggest that message writing style is a potential source of bias in message triage and could inform possible solutions for mitigating disparities,’ said lead researcher Dr Mitchell Tang.