Will Healthcare Ever Solve These Issues?

On James Ritchie’s post on EMR and HIPAA extolling the virtues of Patient Portals, Bill made the following comment:

I visited an ENT practice today for the first time. I was referred by my primary care physician. Guess what? NO PATIENT PORTAL! And this is a large multi-location group. Here’s the really strange part…they bought an EHR 10 years ago and are still using paper charts!!! Flabbergasted!

A couple of days ago, I went to their website, downloaded and filled out the forms. (Yes, I typed them). I then called the practice to ask if they wanted me to fax them so they could get my info entered into their system, the girl replied “no, that’s ok, we don’t create your chart until you get here”. That’s how I found out they are still using paper charts. Unreal!

When I arrived for my appointment today, (NOT 30 minutes early) I could tell the girl at the window was ready to jump on me for being “late”, until I handed her my completely filled out forms. She looked at me in utter amazement. She took my drivers license and insurance card (no, they did not have a scanner for either) so I didnt get them back until I was called back and the nurse gave them back to me. So I had to ask the doctor, “why are you not using your EHR”, he replied, “yeah, we need to start using it” He even commented that he couldnt remember any of his patients that actually typed and then printed the PDF forms. Am I the weirdo here?

Earlier, while in the waiting room, I sat and watched patient after patient go up to the window and get the “high tech” clipboard. They then sat down to fill out their forms…all the while stopping from time to time to text or perhaps reply to an email on their smartphones. The irony. I watched sadly as an older woman was trying to get the forms filled out with what appeared to be great difficulty because it was obvious she didn’t have all of the information with her that she needed. But she had a smartphone. More irony.

Just think if my primary care provider and this ENT group were both using EHR and PP. Perhaps I would of had to fill out NOTHING!! All of my info would of been readily available to the ENT doc. I could view the notes from both of the docs..see my reports and tests results and even forward it to another provider of care if necessary. The study is encouraging, but there are going to be so many benefits once PP’s become mainstream.

I responded to Bill with the following comments:

Such a sad story and far too repeated in healthcare today.

I’ve often said if someone could figure out a way for patients to not have to fill out those dang intake forms, they’d have a golden business. Turns out, it’s a really complex problem to solve because of how many parties are involved and the non-standard way they do it.

Yes, we still have a long way to go to solve even some of the most obvious healthcare issues.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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