I'm sitting in a hotel room in northern Wisconsin tonight. My Delta Airlines app on my smart phone has indicated that I have a new flight. Jere-lyn at The Center must have booked the flight to Alaska for me! I check my flight, make sure my seat selections are all window or aisle, and add the flights to my calendar, which is synchronized to my iPad, phone, and computer. It also updates my Google calendar so that my wife knows exactly when I will return to finish dry-walling the basement. Ah, technology.
On the other hand, my daughter had a clinic appointment a few days ago. My wife tells me the medications that were prescribed for her minor problem. I quickly searched Google for the medications and read as much as I could from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other reputable sources. I was surprised at the amount of serious side effects of one of the medications, so I decide to ask the provider about other options. The only path for me to contact the provider was the communication method that we have used since the depression: telephone messages and promised call backs. I did receive the call, several hours later, and the annoyed voice on the other end of the line was an interesting contrast to the airline experience I had tonight.
Until recently, EHR vendors have been slow to adopt real technology that directly engages patients. Even still, hospitals and clinics have been even slower to implement technologies that engage their patients and truly make them partners in their own care. We get so concerned with engaging physicians to enter orders using CPOE or over thinking the privacy and security implications of providing information directly to patients that we sometimes lose the patient in the process. We are living in the information age, at least according to what my high school science teacher told me, and that information flow too often stops at the hospital or clinic door.
The requirements for Stage 1 of Meaningful Use require testing of information exchange. The proposed rule for Stage 2 requires hospitals and clinics to not only provide patient access to health information but also ensure that 10% of patients actually look at their information online. This is an aggressive goal to be sure and it will likely change in the final rule, but the message is clear: we have had enough time to talk about providing patients with their health information, it is time to act.
If you don't have a plan to implement a portal or a personal health record (PHR) solution at your facility, it is time to create one. If you don't like what your vendor has for a portal, pressure them to change it. Better yet, network with your peers and go to the vendor with a unified voice, or find a better solution for a portal. Next time I go to the clinic I want an app that tells me my lab results are available, my prescription is waiting to be picked up, and my patient education is available for download.
Now if you don't mind, I need to switch to my guitar tuner app on my iPhone to tune my bass, then look up a recipe on my epicurious app, then fax a note to my physician.....
