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medpundit |
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Wednesday, June 09, 2004I am new to your blog. What do you think of the new practice of not reviewing a patients file before see them so as to have a "fresh view"? Both my wife and I were confronted with this on our last doctor's visit, two different doctors, and were shocked when we were forced to give test results from memory to prevent a further round of test. Ideally, it would be nice to have a patient's old record at the first encounter with a new doctor. However, it's often difficult to obtain them. And it seems the larger the physician group, the harder they are to get. There's a tertiary care center not far from my town that is a black hole when it comes to charts. I've never successfully gotten a patient's record from them. So, you do the best you can in a less than ideal world. One of the arguments for mandated electronic medical records is that it will eliminate this kind of problem and thus save money. But I wonder if it will really eliminate it. There will still be the matter of patient privacy, so I doubt that you will be able to go on the internet and get someone's records. Likely, they'll have to be handed over from one doctor to another just as they are now. And will the savings in duplicate tests really be more than the cost of computer systems and software? That I highly doubt, since electronic medical record systems cost several thousand dollars, even for the small office. posted by Sydney on 6/09/2004 07:08:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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