Medicare has about 7,500 specific tasks it pays doctors to perform.  E-mail is not among them.  Ditto for most Blue Cross plans, all the employer plans and most commercial insurers.  But wait…..are Aetna and CIGNA really entering the 21st century?  (DMN story)

Reimbursable e-mail is not like garden-variety e-mail, however.  It has to have a CPT code, a diagnosis, a record of time spent – in short, all the same forms, activities, categories and even payment rates as 20th century, face-to-face consultations.  It's sort of like constructing a state of the art operating room so that shamans can practice bloodletting with leeches.