A rant about medical records
It is very difficult to convey utterly tedious frustration without — well, without thoroughly boring one’s audience. And hence I will not try to explain the full awfulness of modern medical records and information compartmentalization. But I was personally present 5 times in one recent week while Linda gave detailed information about her contact information, medical history, etc. — and all 5 times it was to the same hospital.
In our case, that just costs time. But the information flow in my father’s case upsets me more. I gave a couple of of examples earlier. Here are some more:
- One of my father’s biggest medical problems, which has spawned a number of medical tests over the past few weeks, is internal bleeding. Another, spawning tests for brain damage, is (phrased simply) slowness to wake up. But nobody at Riverside Hospital knew he’d had multiple falls the day of his original admission until I finally had the Friendship Village nursing notes read to me, and then summarized them as best I could for Riverside.
- After a few days at an extended-care facility, he’s back at Riverside. The first doctor I spoke with at Riverside was totally confused about the reason for his previous admission, which started August 29 and ended last Thursday.
- Another doctor at Riverside did know better what was going on, and told me the results of a test from a previous admission, contradicting what I had been told before.
- The last point potentially matters, because what’s really going on is serious intestinal bleeding, and they hospital doesn’t seem to know much about his history with respect to blood count or intestinal distress. Nor will they know until I make the connection between his usual doctors and the hospital. Edit: And there’s a good chance I will be asked to participate in life/death decisions before they bother getting back to me to have that conversation. Actually, telling a certain voice mail that I was “ticked off” at the lack of response turned out to work well. (Yes, that’s mild language for me — but it was Columbus, Ohio that I was speaking to.)
- Edit: And here’s another piece of nonsense — both Riverside Hospital (this latest visit) and the extended-care hospital had the wrong contact person in the charts, notwithstanding that he was at Riverside for a few weeks ending last Thursday, and they of course eventually got the correct contact information at that time, and also notwithstanding that they DO seem to in some cases have access to his charts from the prior stay.
Now, it’s quite possible none of this will have the slightest effect on outcomes for my old and very sick father. But given all the resources that society is spending trying to help him by, among other things, performing medical tests, it is appalling how medical information policies obscure years of information that already exists.
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I am sorry to hear about your Dad and you suffering so much. I had similar experiences while getting health centre and hospital treatments for myself when I was lastly in the US. It seems that financial health records are much more easily streamlined and accessible with privacy safeguards than health records or health history. It is actually more about how database policies for heatlh history versus credit history is implemented.
Again- I hope things get better soon.
yes, it’s frustrating, not ideal and inefficient. i’m afraid of what’s to come with more gov’t intrusion.