Chief Medical Officer

Everyone wants to be educated by a credible organization on topics that impact them and that they can act on. Most patients have limited knowledge and understanding of the healthcare process. Your healthcare organization, together with members of your medical staff, can reach out to healthcare consumers during a time when they are healthy, to educate them on this process. One example of how to use your physicians and your health information to pull more healthcare consumers into your base is a brief training session on how physicians document a patient’s history and physical. In this type of brief session, patients get to interact with a physician in a way that will help them understand the process and the physician better – it may even make them more comfortable with the process. And, physicians become the teacher of why it’s important to have good information in the record.

The patient record and what it represents is at the core of every healthcare encounter. The record is legal evidence that the encounter occurred. In a typical hospital visit, at least 14 different clinicians, all the ultimate responsibility of the attending physician, will document in each patient’s record. Every clinician and most non-clinical employees, whether through direct entries, analyzing information, entering information into a computer system, or just moving the record from point A to point B, have impacted the patient record in some way. And today, most patients are now aware of their rights in their health information as a result of HIPAA regulations. A patient is three times more likely to ask for a copy of their medical record today than she was ten years ago. And, that same patient is twice as likely to read and comprehend the information in her record as she was a decade ago. These activities not only justify keeping the document as impeccable as possible, but more importantly point to an opportunity to use the information in a strategic manner.