Question

Case Study: A 65-year-old woman was just been diagnosed with Stage 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She was informed of this diagnosis in her primary care physician's office. She leaves her physician's office and goes home to review all of her tests and lab results with her family. She goes home and logs into her PHR. She is only able to pull up a portion of her test results. She calls her physician's office with concern. The office staff discussed that she had gone to receive part of her lab work at a lab not connected to the organization, part was completed at the emergency room, and part was completed in the lab that is part of the doctor's office organization.

The above scenario might be a scenario that you have commonly worked with in clinical practice. For many reasons, patients often receive healthcare from multiple organizations that might have different systems.

As you review this scenario, reflect and answer these questions for this discussion.

What are the pros and cons of the situation in the case study?

What safeguards are included in patient portals and PHRs to help patients and healthcare professionals ensure safety?

Do you agree or disagree with this process?

What are challenges for patients that do not have access to all of the EHRs? Remember, only portions of the EHRs are typically included in the PHRs.

Answer 1

Innovative techniques in healthcare had brought drastic changes in the industry. It helped to save time and utilise the services effectively for both the consumers as well the professionals. Most of the technological advancement had led to digitalisation and less usage on paperwork with manual entries. Nowadays, many healthcare institutions are using the electronic patient health record for record maintenance.

From the above scenario, where the patient had some access to her reports through EHR and some reports are not connected to the health record. High number of organisations work in collaboration with many health centers and laboratories for some of its services. These type of system has both benefits and drawbacks which can help as well affect the clients and their families.

Pros -

1) In this type of collaborative services, the patient receives proper guidance to reach the destination correctly to receive the services.

2) Patient and family are in touch for completing the tests.

Cons - In this type of services, the disadvantages outweighs the benefits to the client and the family.

1) The client need to spend more time and money for different services under various roof of healthcare units.

2) It makes the client and their families to become anxious and frustrated.

3) It can lead to confusion if there is lack of proper communication.

Electronic Health Record is one of the useful way to maintain records effectively with appropriate technical supervision.

- EHR safeguards the patients data appropriately

- It helps to maintain the confidentiality of the customer data

- It can provide easy and instant access to patient anywhere and anytime which ease the doctor for consultation

- Patient portals are easy to use for both patient and professionals.

- It shows the continuity of the treatment of the client received in their organisation

- The presence of data can safeguard the healthcare professionals from medico legal implications

- Any permanent damages due to fire can spoil the data which are stored in paper forms, EHR safeguards the organisation for easy retrieval of data

- It helps to retrieve retrospective data for patients future use

- This type of portals can be helpful for collecting data for hospital usage on general terms like inpatient, outpatient numbers, mortality data

- Moreover, with consent from patient, certain datas can be derived for research purposes.

I personally doesn't agree with this process because it creates chaos when the patient wanted to review all the reports and get consultation.

Challenges-

- Delay on consultation is possible without all reports

- Delay in treatment because of lack of baseline reports

- Without EHR accesibility, the patient need to maintain all reports in paper form and appropriate storage. If lost, then need to go to the specific organisation, to collect all duplicate reports

- It becomes time consuming process for the clients as well as families.

- Few crucial reports are not reflected on the portal because of its nature of the result, for example, HIV positive result, pay smear positive, cancer revealing reports. For these type of reports, the patient and families need to be counselled well to accept the outcome of the result.