Patient centered care is becoming a watchword for modern healthcare. However, getting all of the information required to provide truly patient-centered care into the right hands is a big undertaking.
This post describes a small step towards that goal by starting with something that should be simple – visiting a doctor for the first time.
Today, when you establish your appointment, you coordinate your various calendars with the doctor’s office. The receptionist requests that you show up for your appointment 15 minutes early and bring ID and insurance cards. When you show up for your appointment, you run into your first obstacle, that big multipage medical information form that every doctor’s office asks you to fill out. You answer the questions to the best of your ability, but the information is only as good as your memory. What if this experience could be painless for you and more efficient for your doctor? It could be in the Respect Network.
With the Respect Network, your personal cloud negotiates a date and time for the appointment with the physician’s business cloud and sends a message through a secure app to confirm the appointment.
The Physician’s business cloud reaches out to your personal cloud with a connection request to begin the process of establishing you as a patient. Your cloud negotiates a HIPAA compliant connection to affirm your privacy rights and permissions. Your cloud then allows limited HIPAA compliant connections to the following network member clouds as required to establish you as a patient.
- Personal contact, demographic data, and patient-supplied medical history are made available from your personal cloud
- Insurance coverage and eligibility data from your insurance company’s cloud
- Employment data as necessary from your employer’s cloud
- Current prescription data from your pharmacy’s cloud
- Relevant medical contact information, referrals, and current treatment information from various physician clouds
- Emergency contact and medical history details from family and friend clouds
- Fitness history, weight, and activity levels from your fitness cloud
- Copayment authorization from your financial institution’s cloud
While most of the information has been gathered from the various clouds outlined above, there is always a bit that needs to be gathered manually, especially if the physician is a specialist. The physician’s cloud requests the 10% that cannot be populated from existing cloud data. The request is sent through a secure messaging app to you, the patient. You answer the questions to complete your profile. Your cloud stores the information for future reference, and the doctor’s business cloud creates the initial patient EHR, including any alerts or flags for the Doctor’s attention.
When you show up for the appointment, there’s no waiting, no forms to complete; just the care and attention of your medical team.
The situations I described in this blog series aren’t earth shaking, and they certainly don’t solve the big problems in life. What they do show is the power of personal clouds to make your life more convenient, more efficient. The personal clouds in the Respect Network are built to leverage the power of the Internet to solve problems big and small. They do so with security, privacy, and trust.
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