4 ms·
I work in healthcare and in my office we likely receive 100-200 pages of faxes everyday. Every single microbiology report in my large urban hospital prints out
by giarc 8y ago
I work in healthcare and in my office we likely receive 100-200 pages of faxes everyday. Every single microbiology report in my large urban hospital prints out (including preliminary results. This includes a cover page for every single fax. It's a huge waste of paper. Luckily we are moving to Epic and all results will come through that system instead.
- jedimastert 8y agoI'm mildly concerned with how many people that aren't directly involved with my medical care could read those reports. It's not like they have to break open an envelope or a filing cabinet or something either. Just another piece of paper to be casually picked up and scanned for filing.
- reaperducer 8y agoI'm not the OP, but I do work pushing buttons in healthcare. In our company incoming faxes are OCR'ed and routed to the proper person by e-mail. I can't say how well it works because nobody's faxed me (nor should anyone), but since every employee gets HIPAA training, I don't think there's much cause for worry about misdirected faxes.
- conanbatt 8y agoWhat did you use for OCR? Can you identify patients or do you only use it to identify document types?
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoI know someone whose medical records - including full details of the removal of her brain tumour - were faxed to a hairdresser because the operator swapped a couple of digits in the number.
- jedimastert 8y agoThat thought gives me so much anxiety.
- tracker1 8y agoFor what it's worth, paper is a renewable resource, and trashing it is literally burying carbon from the atmosphere. (not using bleached-white paper would be an improvement though)
- shliachtx 8y ago> Luckily we are moving to Epic This may be the first time those words were used together in a sentence.
- giarc 8y agoI work in Alberta and we have 5 distinct health care regions although we all work under one umbrella organization. All regions use different EMR systems, some regions and major hospitals are still not currently using any system, and all orders are written by hand. So an opinion on Epic as an EMR is perhaps minor compared to EMR vs hand written systems.
- conanbatt 8y agoLiterally lol'd at this.
- nradov 8y agoEpic will work fine for this, but every other EHR released in the past several years is also capable of receiving electronic microbiology reports. Your office must have been using something really obsolete before that.
- giarc 8y agoThe hospitals in my city were using Sunrise and the micro reports are included in Results tab but for some reason we still get faxes (legacy practices maybe). The problem is the province wanted one system across all sites. Currently there are a ton of different EMRs used by different hospitals that obviously don't talk to each other. So transferring a patient between sites, even down the road basically involves printing/photocopying every single piece of paper and physically sending it with the patient. I'm sure less than 5% of that ever gets read.
- nradov 8y agoIn theory any modern EHR should be able to export an HL7 C-CDA 2.1 CCD containing all essential parts of the patient's chart, and then deliver that to another provider via secure Direct Project messaging. But in practice many organizations don't have those features properly configured, or the connections haven't been established, or staff haven't been properly trained.