Clinical information systems and healthcare patient portals are proving to be a significant waste of money. Millions of dollars are invested into developing and maintaining these platforms, often by third-party vendors, to provide patients with online access to their medical records. While the idea behind these portals is great in theory, the execution falls flat when healthcare providers continue to send massive amounts of paper copies through the mail, despite the digital system. This redundancy is both financially wasteful and environmentally harmful, especially when patients like me would prefer a paperless option.
Even more frustrating is that at my current health insurance company, I can’t even opt out of receiving paper copies. Despite several attempts to request this, I’m told there’s no way to stop the influx of mail. Now, I’m left with no choice but to purchase a $70 paper shredder just to deal with the overwhelming amount of unnecessary paperwork I receive. It feels like an outdated system where healthcare organizations are not fully committed to leveraging the digital tools they’ve invested in.
To make matters worse, the US Postal Service bears the burden of delivering all these unnecessary documents. This means taxpayers and other users of the postal system are indirectly subsidizing this inefficiency. It’s absurd that after all the time and money spent on developing patient portals, they’re not serving their purpose if the same information is just going to be mailed out anyway. It’s a huge missed opportunity for cost savings and sustainability.
For anyone curious about which platforms I’m talking about, my chart, Healow. These are the two that I have used. I’m sure there are many others, but Blue Cross is also part of the problem, they have their own custom proprietary software that you can log in and see your bill and all that stuff but they will still send you the crap in the mail. And cannot get them to stop
Working in healthcare, let me tell you that it’s not just on your end. There needs to be a national standard for transmitting data. Getting faxes from other facilities and then having them scanned in is a fucking pain in the ass. It does not even attempt OCR. All your diagnostics will be done again. Patients tend to not know how to navigate the release of that information to the new facility half the time. So in those moments where that information is useful, it doesn’t get to the providers that need it.
FHIR baby!
Such a standard has existed for decades. It’s called HL7
It only works if it’s implemented, I still see regular scanned in records instead of linked records.
Yes but that is not due to a lack of standard for electronic communication.
Sometimes you have to deal with providers that do not have digital records, sometimes they are old medical records that were not digitized, sometimes the insurance companies do it on purpose to drag things out