Category: The Truth About Health Care

Please enjoy this recycled oldie-but-goodie while I spend the next 6 weeks juggling a high case load with studying for the boards with taking care of two babies, etc. . .

The migration has begun. All over Michigan, the annual migration of flocks moving south is in full swing. And behind those flocks, the other annual Michigan migration is starting too. Our office is starting to see our winter ‘checkout’ patients before they migrate south for the winter.

Over the next month, I’ll see a multitude of patients come in to get ‘checked out’ and get paper prescriptions to take with them to Florida in case they find themselves under threat of missing a golf outing due to varying states of cougheyness and/or wheeziness. Many of them have physicians in Florida that they sometimes see, and occasionally they get hospitalized while down there. They usually come back with an impeccable tan, an extra spring in their step, and a story of their various physician visits and /or hospitalizations with more holes in it than your average disability application.  They also explain that any tests that I’m about to order have probably already been done by their physicians in Florida, and they’d like me to take a look at those records before I order anything. We then start the dance of trying to get copies of their charts, which goes something like this:

Records Requested:                                 Records Received:
Request for chart.                                                     Nothing                  

Second request.                                                       Nurses notes 

Third request..                                   Copy of diet recommendations.

This whole dance has started to make me wonder about my ardent support for the electronification of medical records, which is supposed to do for medical care what the invention of sliced bread did for a fledgling sliced deli meat industry. By now we’re all aware that the Institute of Medicine (which by the way, to me sounds like a made up name) tells us that a gazillion patients are unnecessarily being decapitated every day because physicians’ illegible orders for ‘allow decaf for patient’ are being misinterpreted by hapless nurses as ‘and now decapitation’. Electronic medical records, says the Institute, would successfully ameliorate the silent killer that is physician penmanship.
But how does this impact the care of patients who had treatment from another physician or medical system, whether it was across the country or across the street? Nada. If I want to see those high tech electronic records, it still requires that I talk to a person, those records must then be printed, then faxed. Because of this, many of these tests end up being duplicated, and because of the awesomeness/stupidness of medicare, it has continued to pay for the duplication of these tests even if it has only been days since the original tests were done.

It seems to me then, that adding electronic medical records to the current system is kinda like adding a microchip to an abacus. . . in the end all you get might be nothing more than a fantastically expensive Goldberg machine. To me the only way that electronification of medical records will ever be the revolution that it’s backers claim it will be, is when there is a high degree of compatibility between systems. This would allow patients’ data to be shared among multiple different records systems. It would provide patients greater mobility between medical systems, rather than being tied to whatever system their PCP happens to be in. That greater mobility in turn might place greater pricing pressure on different medical systems as they are forced to compete to a greater degree. So how exactly do we implement this? I don’t know. But I promise I’ll start thinking about it once I’m done faxing all these diet recommendations to Florida.