Author Archive

Doctors Say One Thing, Patients Hear Another

September 7, 2010 · Filed Under found on the net · 4 Comments

The Boston Globe has a revealing article about a study published in Annals of Internal Medicine where patients thought that a heart stent would help prevent another heart attack. But doctors had only told patients that it would relieve future chest pain. How can such a communication disconnect still happen in this modern age of medicine? Read the full article, Study finds doctor-patient disconnect.

Caremark, Prescriptions and Personal Information

September 1, 2010 · Filed Under e-patient stories, general, medical records, policy issues · 3 Comments

A friend of mine, Ms. S., recently had an unsettling experience with a company called Caremark (the parent company of pharmacy CVS), whom she fills her prescriptions through. She was reordering a prescription refill she buys through the mail, and needed to pay for it. She tried logging onto their website to pay, as I’m sure thousands of people do everyday, but because her order was “In process,” it wouldn’t let her pay for it.

Caremark called her this morning. The conversation went something like this…

Caremark: “Hi, this is ****** from Caremark. I’m calling about a recent order. Can I get you to verify your name, date of birth and mailing address?”

Ms. S: “I’m sorry, but how do I know you’re from Caremark? You called me.”

Woman Loses Health Insurance Due to Facebook

November 21, 2009 · Filed Under general, hc's problem list, policy issues, reforming hc · 25 Comments

Imagine a world you live in where every insurance offering is accompanied by a creepy set of Big Brother-like ongoing investigations into your life. Everything will be used as evidence against you. Yes, even your Facebook profile.

That world is here. Well, not right here, but up north in Canada.

Yes, a Canadian insurance company decided to keep tabs on a woman it was paying sick leave benefits to, and lo and behold, that woman was having — wait for it — fun!

Nathalie Blanchard, a 29-year-old IBM employee from Quebec, took a long-term sick leave from her job after being diagnosed with major depression. Her doctor told her to try & have fun, and to take a sunny vacation to get away from her problems. She did just that while she received monthly sick-leave benefits from Manulife.

And she posted her vacation photos on her private Facebook profile. But recently, the monthly payments stopped.

Why? Because Manulife, her insurance company, found the photos and made the medical diagnosis — from a photo, mind you — that she no longer suffered from major depression. From a photo.

Why Electronic Medical Records Still Leak

September 18, 2009 · Filed Under general, hc's problem list, medical records, news & gossip, policy issues, reforming hc · 8 Comments

I hear it time and time again in the e-health industry:

“If only we had everyone on an electronic medical record, all of our security and privacy issues would be solved!”

Really?

Perhaps I should introduce you to a little something psychologists like to call “human behavior.” Human behavior will always trump technology when it comes to finding a way to undo everything well-meaning EHRs, EMRs, and PHRs try to implement.

How to Rein in Medical Costs

August 12, 2009 · Filed Under found on the net · 2 Comments

You know you’re going to get a pretty interesting debate about healthcare costs when George Lundberg offers his advice on how to control health care costs right now. A well thought-out piece and one deserving of everyone’s time to read it. Costs can be reigned in, if only we had the willpower to do it.

For Want of a Surge Protector…

June 4, 2009 · Filed Under general, hc's problem list, medical records · 3 Comments

It seems somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible for this to happen in this day and age, but Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis had to turn away patients when a power surge took down its electronic medical records system. Yes, that’s right — our computers are down, and we can’t keep up with the paperwork backlog in order to admit new patients.

If the future of healthcare is electronic, someone in the IT department needs to ensure the computers providing these services are protected from simple things like electric surges. I think it’s called a “surge protector” and Wal-Mart sells them for $10.

Now sure, this was an isolated incident and the hospital was back up and running a few hours later. But still, it makes one wonder… If we can’t get something as simple as this right, how much luck are we going to have with the future of healthcare in the hands of people who can’t see the forest through the trees. Because no matter how unwieldy paper records are, they are there, even in the worst emergencies possible.

E-Patient Discovers Significant Flaws in System, Spin Doctors Get to Work

April 14, 2009 · Filed Under e-patient stories, general, hc's problem list, news & gossip, reforming hc · 12 Comments

It is absolutely amazing to watch the unfolding saga the moment a real patient enters real data into Google Health from his hospital’s medical records. The way the marketing folks tell us, this is a seamless exercise that gets you up and running on personal health records (PHRs) like Google Health instantly.

The reality, as recounted here first on April 1 by our own e-Patient Dave, shows otherwise. The emperor has no clothes, and it apparently took a single real patient to try it out to show how such a seemingly simple idea — pulling in medical data from your medical records to help you track your health — is really far more complex than even Google realized.

But the fun really started watching the media coverage unfold once The Boston Globe published this article about e-Patient Dave’s experience with Google Health and his attempt to import data from his hospital’s electronic medical record.

Electronic Health Records Raise Doubt

April 13, 2009 · Filed Under found on the net, medical records · 3 Comments

The Boston Globe takes note of the morass that is Google Health when connecting it to your medical records, as recounted earlier by our own e-Patient Dave here on e-patients.net.

When is “Information Therapy” Simply Learning?

April 6, 2009 · Filed Under general, policy issues, pt/doc co-care, reforming hc, trends & principles · 51 Comments

I sometimes wonder whether we complicate things that are pretty simple, by assigning more labels and new terms to things that have perfectly good labels already.

For instance, I once thought I knew what “information therapy” meant. It meant a doctor or other healthcare professional “prescribed” certain information for you to read, so you could learn about your health or mental health condition. Before the Internet, therapists called this bibliotherapy, as it usually referred to reading a certain book on depression, anxiety or the like. “Information therapy” is a fine term and all (it must be, since there’s an entire nonprofit devoted to it), but a recent blog entry over at The Health Care Blog has made me rethink whether it brings any value to the conversation.

Words must mean something unique, or else they lose all value. Look at the way Facebook and other social networks have co-opted the ordinary-looking word, “friend.” Prior to 2000, a friend was someone you knew and trusted and nearly always someone you actually knew at one time face-to-face. With its co-opted use on social networks, a “friend” now means nothing. It means someone who may have some sort of nebulous connection to you — either an acquaintance, a business associated, or even a complete stranger. It might mean your best friend, or it might mean someone you once talked to at a conference. It might mean you know them presently, or it might mean you haven’t spoken to them (even online) for 10 years. Most social networks today don’t clearly delineate the nature of the relationship and its current status.

So when I read an entry entitled, “The Great Debates,” I suspect there’ll be a lot of intelligent discussion focused around how two different philosophies and approaches might be in conflict (and how to resolve such conflict as it arises).

You’re Not Crazy After All

April 6, 2009 · Filed Under found on the net · 1 Comment

Had chemotherapy and weeks after the treatment has ended, still feeling not quite yourself? You’re not alone. The memory and cognitive problems after receiving chemotherapy is known as “chemobrain.” As Ellen Clegg notes in The Cloud Over Chemotherapy, finally the medical profession is taking notice of years of patients’ complaints about this phenomenon and conducting the needed research. Better late than never, I suppose, but it does make you wonder — what were doctors thinking their patients were complaining about all those years? All just in their heads? Or a not well-explained but expected side effect of chemo?

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