EHR

I’ve been heard here on the topic of getting a barcode tattooed on my neck to avoid having to fill out another one of those damned forms-on-a-clipboard at a medical provider’s office. I’ve also been heard all over the interwebz (mostly Twitter) on the excrescence that is poly-portalitis syndrome (PPS), caused by the plethora of portals presented by providers under current EHR adoption drive. In late 2013, I had a V-8 forehead slap moment, realizing that a QR code – I have created several of those, including the one (different than the tattoo!) on my business card – would be a great way to accomplish my objective. QR code reader smartphone apps are in relatively common use, and I also figured that a tattoo would be a conversation starter in the rooms where I work to shift the medical-industrial complex’s thinking on patient engagement and participatory medicine. Even though it took me over six months to find a tattoo artist willing to do this – and I live in the 3rd most tattooed city in America, according to a Today Show story in 2010 –  and then another couple months to gather the shekels to pay for it, almost a year ago, on June 18, 2014, I presented myself at Graffiti’s Ink Gallery for my inkapalooza. This was not my first tattoo rodeo. I had done what I thought was required due-diligence in researching the size and pixel resolution on the QR code itself, and had had a couple of meetings with the artist to make sure we were on the same ink dot. I created a page on this site, password-protected it, created a QR code that linked to that page, and we were good to go. On that page, after you plug in the password that’s inked at the bottom of the tattoo (and…

I confess that I’d happily get a barcode tattooed on my neck if it meant I’d never have to fill out another ****ing health history form in a doctor’s office. I’m totally serious. Paper records are so … 19th century. With the advent of the current iteration of “health care reform” (which is really “health INSURANCE reform,” but that’s a blog post for another day), much has been made of the importance of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems in building a national Health Information Exchange (HIE). Medicine = Acronym World. The Pentagon are pikers when it comes to fogging the battlefield with impenetrable letter-fication. 21st century health care certainly must involve a lot of easily-shared data, with health history and diagnostic information traveling literally at light speed between doctor’s offices, hospitals, and clinics. Not only does it speed care, it can ensure safety: the right record, with the right patient, makes the right care clear. The thorny-issue part is this: whose data is it, anyway? Doctors certainly need to have full access to all the data on patients they’ve treated. Hospitals have to keep records on the people they’ve treated on their wards, in their clinics, and in their ORs. Payers (insurers, Medicare, Medicaid, et al) need data access to pay claims, track demographics, and create statistical and financial forecasts. And patients must have access to their own data, at minimum to vet it for errors, at best to own a full copy of their health history since birth to share with providers and care-givers. I spent 8 months trying to correct an error on the report for the breast MRI I had in 2008 as preparation for my cancer surgery. The report said “family history of breast cancer.” NO. I was Patient Zero, there was NO family history of…