by Mark Garver December 16, 2021
We hear so much about the improvements in Healthcare Technology, including those that provide for patient access to their personal healthcare information through secure portals and even smartphone applications. These are all incredible improvements; however, their implementations are not found everywhere.
A few weeks ago, my 85-year-old father was admitted to the ICU at his local hospital with what appeared to be a mild case of COVID-19, which quickly took a turn for the worse. For the first few days, family was allowed to visit, until new guidelines from the CDC and COVID isolation went into effect. In order to get any information, we had to call the nurse for updates, and you can imagine having multiple family members all calling for updates, the impact this has on the nurses.
Given my experience from my larger healthcare network, I inquired if there was a secure portal or application that we could access to get updates rather than calling. There wasn’t, so it was going to be updates by phone. When we were notified about my father’s oxygen levels being extremely low, we asked the hospital what his normal ranges were, to which they replied the didn’t know. The issue is access to shared data by primary care physicians and hospitals. We contacted my father’s physician’s office and got the information and shared it with the hospital.
My father has made a full recovery; however, the experience illustrates that while we read about or even use many of the patient facing new healthcare technologies, the adoption of it isn’t 100%. Due to cost and budget constraints these technologies are not affordable by smaller independent healthcare systems. The care that was given my father at his local hospital was incredible and professional, and his experience was great according to him. We had great interaction with the doctors and nurses, but had simple things such as a secure web portal for patient data and updates, and shared medical record technology been in place, we wouldn’t have had to place a burden on the hospital staff for updates.
Until new healthcare technology is affordable everywhere, families will unfortunately have to rely on the old ways of dealing with the healthcare system.
