Online Consultations     The California Health Care Foundation has recently published information regarding online consultations. The purpose of the study was to determine whether online consultations could reduce health care costs, improve patient satisfaction, and save patient and physician time.     This pilot study was actually conducted in Connecticut and portions of northern California. For health plans that reimbursed for online consultations, monthly spending on physician office visits declined almost two dollars per patient for those particular plans.     Physician's response time was noted to strongly influence patient satisfaction with the system.     Patients generally considered the online consultation system more convenient than a phone call to their physician.     Sixty-six percent of patients rated their online consultation physician encounter as good or excellent. That figure increased from sixty-six percent to eighty-seven percent if the physician responded by the following day.     Most physicians participating in the study said the system was easy to use, satisfying, and did not have a problem integrating it into their daily routine.     The adage, give a busy person something to do and it will get done promptly was never more true than in this pilot study. Among physicians whose offices receive more than thirty phone messages daily, eighty six percent of those physicians were pleased with the program and said they would recommend the service to a colleague and would continue to use the software after the pilot study was concluded.     Online Orthopaedics Virtual Consultation program is not exactly the same as the pilot study referred to here.     Online Orthopaedics Virtual Consultation is more an attempt to allow the patient to come to some specific conclusions about the origin of their specific symptoms and complaints.     Online Orthopaedics Virtual Consultation will initially address the problem of neck and shoulder pain and then will be extended to other areas of the body, including, but not limited to the knee, hip, and spine.