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We need to establish a national "Check Your Medical Records" day - L&L

Posted: Jan 03, 2010

Think about it; there are national days for Everything.

If patients were made aware of their ability and need to check and verify their medical information, may the problems of ILPs and ASR (and EMR) would become noteworthy outside our little MT community.

I wonder how we could start it. Maybe you need to petition Congress or something.

Heck, if there is a national day to check the 9-volt battery in your smoke detector, a national day set aside to verify the accuracy of your medical information doesn't seem unreasonable.

Let's give it some thought.

That already exists. AHDI (formerly AAMT) - encourages it.

[ In Reply To ..]
At some point every year-- I forget when -- it must have been during national medical transcription week -- AAMT would send out a basic form letter and we were encouraged to submit a version of it to our local newspapers encouraging the general public to check their medical records. Other local MTs and I submitted such a letter several times to the local paper -- none of the letters was ever published.

Another thing though is that we are so used to reading medical reports that we don't remember what it was like to read them before we had been trained to be MTs.

How well would the general public really understand their reports ?

I remember once getting copies of reports I had requested from a former doctor in another city. I called his office all in a huff to complain about him saying "Patient denied..." and "Patient admitted to..." -- like there was some guilt being attributed somehow. I did not know at that time that that was just medical report language.

However one of my colleagues got copies of all of her medical records and waded through them -- and found she has a past medical history that reads like it belongs to someone else at points. Once a mistake is in the record, it gets perpetuated over the years when each physician refers to past reports to dictate the PMH/PSH lists. Getting things stricken from the record is practically impossible she has found. So each time she sees a doctor, she points out the things in her record that are incorrect and asks them to please put that disclaimer in their report. The best she has gotten so far was a doctor who put in the report: "According to the patient, some of the following information may not be up to date." And then he went ahead and put the same old PMH/PSH list -- without specifying the inaccuracies she had listed for him.

This universal EMR --while great in theory--is gonna be a headache. The people not involved in creating it just don't realize how many inaccuracies there are in the existing documentation.

One of my all-time favorites was a patient who -- in the same report -- was a widower, yet had his wife at the bedside; had no children, yet his son and daughter were on their way to the hospital; and was allergic to morphine, which he was of course taking ! That was quite a lot of inconsistency for just one report. I've never forgotten it.

Who is going to educate the general public if not us? - L&L

[ In Reply To ..]
Forget that worthless organization of self-agrandizing old biddes (aka AHDI).

I'm sure most of the general public still is not aware they can request copies of their records.

My daughter had an incident with an aspirin overuse many years back. The treating psychiatrist had many inaccurates in her report that clearly indicated they came from his canned H&P. This will only be getting worse with more canned info on the EMR.

My local docs currently have me take 2 pages of information the patients fill out (PMH,SH,FH,MEDS) and incorporate into their H&Ps w/o actually dictating the information (and I've been doing this 26 yrs). When they go EMR, they plan to have the in-house staff do this. I give it 4-5 weeks. They all think they know everything because they know GI terms, but what about all the other umpteen specialities.

ANYWAY, I still think it is up to us at MTs to educate the public about what we already know are issues. Forget newspapers...who reads them anyway.

We need to get some kind of Readers Digest article out with "funny" stories about all the mistakes we see and the harm it can cause. It is up to US, and we need to figure out how to warn the general public. Who else will?

The public doesn't care - nobody reads is right

[ In Reply To ..]
Nobody wants to be educated about things they don't understand and aren't interested in to begin with. Its like saying the public needs to be educated about the cars they drive - most people would disagree that they need to know about the manufacture or mechanics of their car as long as they can drive it. Or how their food is processed before it gets to the store. Even if you purchased half the billboards in the nation for your purpose, most would just shrug when they saw "Have you seen your medical records today" and say, "why?". Sorry, we care more about what is in our credit reports that our medical records.

Not to mention the fact that most providers really don't want to give them to their patients - why volunteer for lawsuits? Its pretty hard to get them without throwing a public tantrum in some places - providers just get all patronizing, tell you you don't need 'em and can't understand 'em, that they'll only confuse you...the practice is definitely not encouraged by doctors.

Check your medical records and seeing a falsehood - Linda

[ In Reply To ..]
I wrote about this before. Several years ago I had elective surgery, paid up front $$$ and had to pay for the operating room, overnight stay, etc. The surgeon forgot 1 part of the surgery, asked for refund, did not get. Nine months later he dictated the report, falsying it and put in the part he forgot just like he had done it. My name is very unusual, no way would he have forgotten, especially since he called me personally several times when I tried to recup my money with threatening tone. I worked in medical records, went to the head and told what he had done in falsifying and she said I could just write a note to include in my record that I disagreed. Yep, it happened.

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