When you want your medical records

There is NO good reason not to provide a copy of ALL records immediately upon patient release. That this is not standard practice boggles my mind. If you are not a psychiatric patient (as in psychotic) there is absolutely no good reason to not have them as part of the discharge papers.

How about the doctor and staff have better things to do than to drop everything just because someone wants non-emergency clerical work done instantly.

MLO:

Again, you are without clue.

The doctors are not the grand puppetmasters you imagine. We suffer the inconveniences of the inefficient hospitals as well. I go hunting for charts I know I need to sign, and they aren’t available. I go into the hospital computer system to read my dictations and provide my electronic signature, and I am unable to do so due to some software error in the computer. And these are charts of patients long out of the hospital.

Decrepit or not–and I’ll grant you quite a few are–many of the se hospitals are the only show in town. And there are no takers for the competition. Maybe in highly- served and affluent communities there is pressure to develop sppedy chart processing, but in most places, the technology is a depressing blend of the old and the new, and not necessarily the best parts of either.

Sure, I could vote with my feet. But I would have to leave town. And my surgery center privileges require I maintain staff privileges at a local hospital, and that hospital requires I take ER call. So I pretty much have to live with this at it is.

The fact remains: I can’t make the charts I need appear any faster than you can. And if I can’t have the chart, neither can you.