Do you know when you got your last tetanus shot, what your doctor scribbled during your last physical, or what kind of information he’s giving your insurance company about you? Then you don’t yet realize the advantages to keeping one’s own medical records, benefits that are becoming more and more apparent in these difficult days of health care.
Bill Feaster, vice president of sales and marketing for the Bristol-based Macx Inc., said his company has already caught this wave of the future.
Seifert Systems Invests in Energy Efficiency to Strengthen Operations
For manufacturers, energy is more than just another operating expense. It plays a critical role…
Learn More
Although their niche is in medical identification projects, Macx Inc is also trying to apply flash disc technology already used in the military to develop a medical records chip for consumer use.
With such devices, which can hold 120 megabytes on a piece the size of a dog tag -or even on cards similar to the “Smart Card” system already established in Europe – there would be a huge benefit for consumers who want to maintain not only their personal records but also their privacy and ultimately their health.
The statistics are startling, said Feaster, rattling off several, including the fact that redundant lab tests in this country cost more than $1 billion every year, and that one-third of all admissions of elderly persons to hospitals stem from contra-indicated drug interactions.
A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine showed that as many as 44,000 to 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals every year because of medical mistakes due to lack of information, more deaths every year than from car accidents, breast cancer or AIDS.
”It’s incredible; what a waste,” said Easter, noting that the United States has really dropped the ball in the area of managing health care information. “We’re really not as sophisticated as we could be,” he said. “It’s a huge problem, and we’ve never really addressed it ‘en masse.'”
But even though the health care industry has yet to fully embrace electronic transmission and storage of medical records, consumers are rapidly starting to see the light – and demanding to see their records.
”A medical record is an interesting issue,” said Steve DeToy, director of government and public affairs for the R.I. Medical Society, noting that in the last three to five years “there’s been an explosion” in physicians’ offices of patients seeking access to their medical notes.
One reason is that more people in general are interested in health care. Another reason is economics. Because employers change insurers more often than they used to, patients are often forced to change doctors, which means an inevitable shuffling of records.
In fact, said DeToy, a recent survey of Rhode Island doctors showed that between 15 and 25 percent of their patients in any given year are either new or have been forced to change providers, a statistic that 10 years ago would have been “unheard of.”
Rhode Island law requires records be kept for five years and health records are the physical property of the practitioner or facility that compiles them. State laws vary as to how much access patients have, but in Rhode Island, patients are legally entitled to copies of their medical reports.
The first step is to submit a written medical release form or letter to your doctor or the facility where you were treated. There’s a $15 fee for finding the record and it costs 25 cents per copy for the first 100 pages, 10 cents per page after that, and a special handling fee of $10 may be charged if the records must be delivered within 48 hours of the request.
It’s “incredibly expensive” for physicians’ offices to physically locate records for their patients, DeToy said. A staff person must stop what she’s doing to sift through thousands of patient files and copy hundreds of pages, which then must be reviewed by the doctor. That’s because Rhode Island law contains a caveat, primarily for mental health reasons, that says doctors can withhold certain information if they professionally believe “it would be harmful” to the patient to know about it.
Technology, of course, can make the process easier, and once people obtain their medical data there is software available to help them manage it, without unleashing personal information to the Web.
It’s called Personal Health Record, a product of the Delaware-based CapMed Corporation, and is a patient version of software originally designed for doctors’ offices by neurosurgeon Ira Denton and his wife Judith, a former NASA scientist.
Dr. Denton said last week that PHR developed once they realized their ultimate medical records customer was the patient, and they’ve developed a program that’s as technologically “deep” as any used by medical professionals but is still consumer-friendly and easy-to-use.
Similar to the economic program “Quicken,” PHR lets you keep your health details on your own computer, not in an Internet database, with software that allows users to enter and update medical histories for every member of the family and keep current information on medical tests and insurance data.
About 4,100 families across the country are now using the software, said company CEO Ron Templeton, and while Internet safe it also allows users to download pertinent medical articles from the Web into their files. There are also newer versions coming up where users can put emergency information in an encrypted file on the Web, and still keep their personnel data securely filed at home.
While there are other software out there for this purpose, Templeton said theirs is the only one that allows patients to access information directly from physicians’ offices, labs and other health care operations. And with the national Health Insurance Portability Act moving not only to change ownership of medical records to the patients but also to transform medical records into an essentially paperless system, PHR, with its problem oriented system that can track trends over time, is the perfect way to plan ahead, Templeton said.
Employers are also starting to embrace the product as a way they can help their employees stay healthier (and less costly) and as an option in deferred contribution benefit plans.
PHR costs $39.95 and while so far upgrades have been free, there may be costs for additional technological changes – if they’re major – but Dr. Denton said such costs would be kept under $20.
The company is also working to provide PHRs to people who can’t afford it but perhaps “need it the most,” Templeton said, including providing the software to the Care organization for use overseas. For more information, call CapMed at (302) 455-0500 or visit CapMed.com.
