Doctors get hooked up for Web

If you subscribe to the notion that your Web site is like an online version of your office, then doctors should have a waiting page before visitors are allowed in.

Not so with members of the International Association of Dental and Medical Disciplines. In case you’re wondering what the mission is of such an organization, the group states its membership is “comprised of dentists and physicians who are working together to empower doctors to wrestle back control of medicine from insurance companies.”

One such treatment for the plague of insurance companies?

The group sets up its members with a Web site equipped with online bill pay and prescription refill orders (and Flash).

After all, an online parenting magazine polled parents last month and 76 percent of respondents said they would use a Web site to ask for refills if possible, and 56 percent said their physicians didn’t have a Web site.

The cost of an IADMD membership is $1,899 per year. For a full-service Web site alone, that’s not bad.

Come to think of it, I have no idea whether my doctor has a Web site. I sign up for yoga classes online, but have never bothered to Google my primary-care.

A quick search turned up empty.

Does your doc offer web services? Would you like her/him to?

-JACKIE SAUTER, Multimedia Editor