Sharing Medical Information has Positive Effects

7 thoughts on “Sharing Medical Information has Positive Effects”

1. IMHO the last say in an individual’s health care should be the individual. Everyone else is just an advisor. If some people are willing to delegate that authority, that’s their decision based on their own reasons. Anything that removes the option to choose seems like a bad idea to me.
   In the words of James Brown: right on, right on, right on.

2. I wouldn’t expect a doctor to take my word on a diagnosis or prescription, but if it comes to my safety, I’ll walk out rather than get into a debate. My biggest problem with most insurance setups is that they restrict people’s ability to do that. Most doctors are good, but when faced with a bad one, the only smart thing to do is find another, same as you would with a plumber or electrician.
   IMHO the last say in an individual’s health care should be the individual. Everyone else is just an advisor. If some people are willing to delegate that authority, that’s their decision based on their own reasons. Anything that removes the option to choose seems like a bad idea to me.
   I’m not only allowed, but expected to review my own records for accuracy. I wish everyone had that opportunity. I have an unfounded gut feeling that the lying patient problem is overstated. It’s certainly not a good reason for keeping patients from even seeing what their records say. The hospital’s fear of having medical records used against them in court is a more logical reason for that.

3. These are all points (Dr. Sharp’s and yours… great name for a medical doctor, btw) to which I refer when I say that “the potential pitfalls are as scary as the benefits are enticing.” For starters, the insurance companies don’t need access to these systems at all, let alone any control over them. No matter the potential benefits, THAT aspect of EMR requires excision. Stat.
   As for your comment that you’d “stop seeing any doctor that wouldn’t take my word over my record,” understand that your current healthcare providers take what you tell them as an addendum to what’s already written down on the page/screen; patients are often less than truthful (not that you are, just saying in general), and the providers are not likely to overwrite what they find in that ‘magic folder’ just because you say they should. This is particularly true of things like immunization records. In that specific case, there’s no negotiation: docs or it never happened.
   If they’re good, they’ll assume you’re being truthful… and then subject you to a battery of tests and questions to make sure of it. “Trust, but verify,” as Ronaldus Magnus once said, is the typical default position there, at least in my experience. However I’ll defer to John’s professional opinion (or any other provider who cares to comment) as to how true my impression of things is in this instance.

4. Personally, I’d stop seeing any doctor that wouldn’t take my word over my record. Additionally, as someone who’s mad a living in data management, I can assure you that anything that can go wrong with paper can go wrong with a computer. User error will always be the #1 cause of record keeping problems even if we could download info directly out of our brains.
   Politically, electronic records are more about crony capitalism than any actual health benefit. Classic case of a company that offers a product no one is buying running to Big Brother to make the industry play fair. Their primary purpose is to communicate between your doctor and the insurance company. The insurance company then has the power to manipulate your record including removing options from the online forms your doctor has to use to prescribe treatment.
   Statists like that they can use the system to gather valuable information under the guise of health care. Why do doctors have to ask children if there’s a gun in their home when they come in for a well child visit? EMRs have great potential but it’s been ruined by political cronyism.
   http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/02/emr-dirty-word-doctors.html

5. In a perfect system, electronic records can be corrected, updated, amended and shared immediately. In theory, the result is a patient record that comes much closer to actually describing the patient at hand to more of the people who need to know.
   Obviously, there is no such thing as a perfect system, and the potential pitfalls are as scary as the benefits are enticing. It’s way too easy to imagine this information altered or deleted with a keystroke, or copied and send to HR departments or identity theives with the click of a mouse (after the unfavorable alteration, possibly!). Suddenly, even our biometric data is subject to seizure by hackers and identity theives, so even a retinal scan or fingerprint isn’t enough to securely access an ATM.
   But paper was certainly not immune to such loss, either. From JTW’s example I would point out that just as those inadvertent additions to his file caused his dad such problems, for the patient who lost them they represent information/actions which never took place in the eyes of the medical establishment, no matter how much that patient might protest that they did. Does anyone here really want to do another colonoscopy because those pages fell out on the way back to Records last trip?
   For patients seeing new doctors for the first time, unless they brought the papers with them from one place to the next (a sincere rarity), they present as a completely blank slate that has to fill in all the blanks all over again. Does anyone here care to weigh odds on how well I remember the details of every single medical procedure, visit or consultation over the last 10 years of my OWN life, let alone my kids? And what about their family history? I remember my own parents and grands significant conditions pretty well, but what about their Mom’s parents and grands? Heck if I remember what my former in-laws’ great uncles died of.
   Oh, and for that extra bit of difficulty to really impress the judges, I’m doing all this on barely three hours of sleep in a waiting room full of sick people while managing a sick, miserable child (the reason for the lack of sleep) while her sister runs around trying to stuff ALL of the building blocks in the play area into her mouth. Or diaper. Whichever. Possibly both. (Hypothetical example, I swear to Ceiling Cat.)
   Electronic records are definitely not a panacea. But they could be a difference maker in urgent or life-saving care. The results from the study aren’t super impressive, but they’re in the right direction and I’m sure that more studies are on the way. I’ll be especially curious to see if patients themselves are able to monitor what’s in those records, are able to always have them to hand (smart phone, tablet, &c.), and have a feasible manner by which they can correct the inevitable errors which will crop up.

6. Having seen the pile of manure many medical records are, I’d shudder at the thought of them ever getting shared electronically with doctors who don’t intimately know the patient already and can see through at least the more blatant errors in them.
   My dad several years ago nearly got a leg amputated when records from another patient slipped into his 2 days before major surgery. He only could stop it because he was given his records (on paper) to pass to the next doctor by a nurse who went off duty (the next doctor was late to come in).
   And when he pointed out the error HE was the one getting the angry looks and was threatened with lawsuits for looking at his own medical records (which are apparently secret documents, eyes only for doctors and nurses, even the person they relate to is not allowed to look at them according to that hospital).
   Had to correct my own pharmacy records several times when I consistently got warning flags about medication I haven’t used in years that was still listed as being current when picking up new pills.
   The list of such failures goes on and on.

7. That’s absolutely OK and indeed helpful as long as I decide whether or not I want to share my medical information. It only becomes a problem if the government forces me to share.