Among your many problems treating patients today, you’ll be surprised to learn that you can easily manage perhaps the most intractable — patient record interoperability — and everyone will benefit when you do! When handled correctly:
- you and other clinicians can deliver better care, be happier, more profitable, more efficient and less subject to burnout.
- your patients can better manage their care, share their records with whomever they please, and save money.
- payers can save money by paying fewer claims and lower premiums, and pay a small fraction of their savings as financial incentives to patients and providers like you.
- your practice and hospital can better serve your community and sustain itself financially.
The Correct Interoperability Test
To your patient, there is only one measure of interoperability that counts: Can you access his complete medical record from all his providers when you need it at the point of care?
- If you can, you can understand his history, prior issues and treatment, and truly coordinate his care.
- If you can’t or can only access some of his records from his other providers (which is likely the case), you may commit costly medical errors that harm rather than help him — perhaps even kill him — or require visits, tests and procedures that add unnecessarily to his healthcare costs.
Today’s widely pursued approach to interoperability fails this test badly. Instead of focusing on whether your patient’s complete record is available to you in the exam room, it focuses on the number of records shared throughout the country!
For example, CareQuality, an EMR vendor network featuring Epic and many other vendors, trumpets that its providers exchange 1 billion medical records each month. While a huge impressive number, it is probably less than 1% of the medical records available in the United States. And given the frequency of power and internet outages, natural disasters, and shutdowns caused by malware and ransomware, it’s probable that all your patient’s records are NOT accessible when you need them. Additionally, his older records may not be accessible because, under state law, providers may no longer be required by law to provide them. Thus, under this system, you at best can be sure you can access SOME of your patient’s records from SOME of his other providers, but NOT ALL his records from ALL his providers! Making matters worse, you have no idea which records are missing. They may be the very ones you need!
This raises the obvious question: Isn’t there a simpler, easier-to-use, less expensive, better way to achieve interoperability? The answer is a resounding YES! It’s called MedKaz® — and it’s available today! (Full disclosure: we created it.)
MedKaz Passes the Interoperability Test With Flying Colors
MedKaz is a unique, secure, groundbreaking system that assembles a patient’s records from all his or her providers, and the application to manage them, on a MedKaz mini drive. Your patient owns and carries it on his keyring with his house and car keys, and shares it with you and his other providers in the exam room. You are paid every time you use it and it thereby materially increases your profits!
- You use it ALONGSIDE your EMR system, on a standalone computer or tablet, as the ultimate source of information about your patient — to understand his medical history and background, and to access his other doctors’ records so you can deliver better, coordinated, lower-cost care. (N.B. Your new revenue greatly exceeds the cost of your standalone computers.)
- At the start of a visit, MedKaz generates a Health Summary and other important information which save you 3 to 6 minutes getting up-to-speed with his issues.
- Next you examine him, and when you need to know more about specific issues and the care he is receiving or has received from his other providers, you instantly search his MedKaz and read their relevant notes in a conventional browser.
- At the end of his visit, you enter YOUR NOTES into YOUR EMR system as usual, NOT into his MedKaz.
Thus, MedKaz saves you time understanding and treating your patient without having to enter a single extra note (it is updated when your EMR system sends a pdf copy of your notes to our MedKaz Server and your patient downloads them onto his MedKaz with just 2 clicks as searchable pdf documents).
Bottom Line
MedKaz gives you instant, easy access to the information you need to treat your patients better, achieve better outcomes, and materially reduce their cost of care — without requiring additional data entry by you. It also increases your patient’s and his employer/insurer/government payer’s satisfaction, and saves them money! At the same time, your new revenue triggered by MedKaz materially increases your profits!
