As a patient and doctor it is clear that there is a great difficulty for most people negotiating the new interactions evolving with the evolution of social media on the back of an expanding and speedier internet.
As a patient, it amazes me that GP – Hospital specialist interactions are mostly by mail and telephone. Email and texting is a rarity. That my scans and other investigation results are not easily available to anyone looking after me reflects how much more work needs to be done in health care IM&T systems.
As a General Practitioner/Family Physician, it troubles me that it remains so difficult to communicate with hospital colleagues about mutual (troublesome/complex) patients. When hospital consultants do give me mobile number, it is not exploited. However, when a situation for prompt care is needed, text message +/- telephone with voicemail has cut through red tape. Using mobile messaging with community nursing team has also improved communication and speeded up management decisions with less impact on my clinics.
We have recently installed DocMan, a document management system. It includes rudimentary OCR technology (Intellisense) but as this is mainly business oriented, it is proving an uphill struggle for receptionists to accurately scan the mail into our document server. And when the doctors do get the letters on their workstations there is too much delay loading up patient clinical codes to make the experience enjoyable. E.g. 87 letters coded yesterday by colleague took over 2.5 hours. For the doctor, it would have been quicker to do that manually!
