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Electronic medical records – here to stay

Patients and doctors have ability to access charts and each other from any computer

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By Ken Mosier, For Healthy Connections 2:50 PM Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Hospitals and doctors’ offices are not immune to natural disasters, as witnessed by the problems New Orleans hospitals had after Hurricane Katrina hit or the devastation of Joplin, Mo., by an EF-5 tornado — devastation that included St. John’s Regional Medical Center.

What happens to patients’ medical records after disasters such as these?

“If you have paper records, they are gone,” said Fred Simpson, MD, medical director and hospitalist for Wilson Memorial Hospital in Sidney. “The records are simply gone after a disaster like those mentioned. Those patients and those practices had a very real problem.

“The electronic record is much safer than paper despite some people’s concern otherwise,” he said. “Not only are those records (maintained) onsite but they are backed up in three different places around the country.”

“Electronic medical records have been kind of mandated on us,” said Larry Ratcliff, MD, medical director of the Providence Medical Group. “But we also see that as an opportunity. It’s really a paradigm shift in how we access information.

“In the past, if you came into my office and I was going to see you for hypertension or a sore foot or something like that, I would access everything up here in my brain,” he continued. “Well, I am doing that now, but I also have reminders making sure of when was your last colonoscopy that I need to talk to you about and have you had your shingles shot to prevent that? Have you had your Pneumovax shot and, oh, by the way, you need a refill on your medications because the pharmacy is sending me information.”

“I think, down the road, the benefits will be rather significant,” said Gary Giffen, executive director of WilsonCare, the physician network of Wilson Memorial. “I think I can foresee the day when you would have a device or have something that you could carry with you wherever you are and, if you had a medical problem, your caregivers could access that immediately.

“If we can just open our minds to the future, we can see that as being a practical outcome of electronic medical records.”

“Premier (Health Partners) started their electronic medical record implementation back about five or six years ago,” said Barry McCorkle, MD, an internist with Belmont Physicians. “A part of this implementation is to get as many of our doctor offices connected as well.

“And, as part of that, there is an opportunity to have patients participate in looking at their medical records through an online portal that is called MyChart,” he said. “The patient visits their doctor’s office and they receive signup instructions from the office. They then go home to their computer and activate their account — very similar to the way you do online banking.

“Everything is secure and it has to be tight access because this is protected health information and we take that very seriously,” McCorkle continued.

“They can then see various aspects of their health record. For example, they can see their medication list and from this list, they can request refills. They have the opportunity to make appointments and they can do medical messaging — secure messaging — and that is like, ‘I have this new problem and I need some advice about it.’ They are instructed that emergency problems are not supposed to be accessed through that so the standard is that we reply to them within 48 hours.”

Similar procedures are in place at Providence.

“We’ve introduced something called the Patient Portal,” said Susan Becker, chief operating officer of Providence. “Patients can interact with us in non-traditional times 24 hours a day. They can leave messages, they can communicate securely with their providers.

“They can look up bills, pay bills and look at test results. They can graph test results, request prescription refills and all sorts of things,” she continued. “They can access health information so, if they have questions and the physician wants them to know more about their hypertension (for example), (the doctor) can push it into the portal and the patient doesn’t have to leave the office with a lot of paper — some of which might be outdated.”

If you are seen by another doctor in the network, there is no need to exchange information via paper or phone call, your primary caregiver will have access to it as soon as it’s entered.

“A lot of times I will say to a patient, ‘I can give you access to your online chart’ and they are like ‘Wow! That is really something. I had no idea that such a thing even existed,’ ” said McCorkle. “Patients are very enthused about it.

“I also think that it’s going to go more and more that patients are going to have the right to access every aspect of their medical information,” he continued. “We’ve already heard from the Center for Medicare Services that they are suggesting that at the present time. ‘Suggesting’ is usually the preface to mandating.”

A major concern for many people is the possibility that their medical records might be disclosed to unauthorized people.

“I personally feel that our records are safer in the electronic world than they ever were on paper,” Simpson said. “Paper charts, someone can open them and take a look. We try to keep those records as safe as possible but the fact of the matter is that with paper charts, somebody can open it, somebody can photocopy it — do whatever they want and then put it back.

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