This is one of the primary features of the company I'm with now, Patients Know Best. (Online communication with your doctor -- though not via email, because th

This is one of the primary features of the company I'm with now, Patients Know Best. (Online communication with your doctor -- though not via email, because that cannot be secured properly). We're not free to hospitals/doctors, which means we don't have a business model pushing us to pull tricks like this. We encrypt each patient's record separately, and would not be able to make any of this patient/professional communication public even if we wanted to. If the patient makes a mistake, they risk sending a message to the wrong one of their own doctors... but there's no chance of public exposure. It's disheartening (but I'm afraid not very surprising) to see this kind of casual but disastrous breach of privacy -- this is the Facebook model of privacy handling, with vaguely positive goals papering over decisions that are unexpected and can be disastrous for some of the users. The painful difference here is that Facebook made its worst missteps around handling mostly trivial communications between college kids. It's always been obvious on Facebook that some things are seen by lots of people, and it's not always clear who sees what. Compare that with Practice Fusion, who builds a website that medical institutions give to their patients -- many of whom will not be web-savvy teenagers by a long shot -- as a way to communicate with them (one would assume, privately). THEN they have one particular place on that website that seems to be for sending feedback to the doctor, where (if you don't read the tiny italicized print) you will unexpectedly be providing content for a completely public database of reviews. Even if it had a large-print warning, most patients will not know this website is not paid for by their doctor; they will probably assume it was created by the practice itself, and they would assume its motivation for existing was to help them communicate with their doctor... so why even bother to read the fine print?