Let's Get Healthcare Communicating with Ease
We’ve all been there. Someone in our family (or ourselves) has a medical concern, schedules a primary care visit, gets some images or lab tests, and maybe even learns that surgery is needed.
What starts as a fairly simple process quickly turns into a near-comedy of inefficiency.
My primary care provider (PCP) retired. Her practice uses EMR-1, but the surgeon down the hall who would do the outpatient procedure, uses EMR-2. Although I am healthy, I needed a medical clearance, so saw my new PCP who uses EMR-3. The surgery center where the procedure was done uses EMR-4, and some of my relevant medical records were in EMR-5 at a nearby hospital.
Despite being within a 1/2 mile of each other, each provider had to Fax my record to the other or send it with me on paper, which the recipient scanned and saved into their EMR and then manually re-entered some data into structured fields.
None could share anything electronically.
None would login to any other’s portal.
None of the practice staff was familiar with Direct Secure messaging.
1 facility uses FHIR (but not for referrals or transitions of care).
And only 1 of 5 could access an HIE, which wasn’t helpful when the others didn’t.
If any of these doctors had a question or needed a clarification, consult note, EKG, or lab value, they or their staff had to pick up the phone. And no matter how good the EMR was at any of these facilities, none could use the data from any of the others to make any of their jobs easier.
In the worst case, the inability to share X-rays, could have resulted in duplicate tests and procedure delay or cancellation.
I spoke with staff members at four of the groups and they estimated their manual work for my simple case ranged from 25-55 minutes.
Is it any wonder that referrals and transitions of care are among the biggest expenses in healthcare? Sharing digital information is too difficult for many practices and results in poor hand-off, unnecessary paperwork, duplicate tests, and frustration for everyone.
The results speak for themselves:
Only 46% of faxed referrals result in a scheduled visit[1]
Up to 50% of primary care physicians never know if their patient saw the recommended specialist
52% of specialty referrals are deemed unnecessary[2]
careMESH provides a foundation to address many of these industry-wide challenges with our comprehensive National Provider Directory (SEARCH). Together with a suite of cloud-enabled services, it is used by hospitals, health plans, public health departments, and other healthcare organizations to manage data and drive the delivery of referrals, test results, medical records, and much more.
Together, I hope we can get healthcare communicating with ease. Please drop me an email anytime.
Peter
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3160594/
[2]https://www.science20.com/news_articles/happy_patients_half_of_doctors_provide_unnecessary_referrals_upon_request-163018