Wow. I've just taken care of three patients in 12 minutes, and I didn't do it by "churning" them through my office as if it's some sort of factory assembly line. Rather, those patients (their parents, more specifically -- I'm a pediatrician), e-mailed me over a secure network with questions and descriptions of signs and symptoms.
One mother attached a digital photo of a rash on her 3-month-old daughter's face; it turned out be nothing more serious than baby acne (it'll go away in a month or so). Another mom had noticed that her son was missing one of his pre-kindergarten immunizations (she had pulled up his shot records online) and requested that I order it. And the father of a 5-month-old boy told me that his son has been constipated off and on for the last month. I e-mailed him a questionnaire so I could determine whether the family should try something at home or bring the child to the office.
In the past, these parents would have left a phone message and we probably would have spent the better part of a day or two playing phone tag. Or they would have had to make an appointment, strap their children into car seats, pack diaper bags and snacks and sit in a waiting room full of sick children -- only to spend 5 to 10 minutes with me while I told them everything was fine. Instead, we fixed the issues by e-mail, allowing parents to stay in their lives at home and at work.
Such interactions are no longer a pipe dream for the future of medicine. This is how I (and several thousand of my colleagues at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California) practice medicine every day. In 2006, we implemented an electronic medical record system and haven't looked back.
The advantages
Medicine is a multi-trillion-dollar-a-year business, yet most doctors still run it like middle-school students passing notes in a classroom: A doctor scribbles something on paper and passes it to a nurse or another doctor, who then scribbles something back. Later, somewhere on those same sheets of paper, another doctor will write something else that's barely legible. It's a primitive, fragmented and unreliable way to do business.
In my pre-electronic days, it wasn't unusual to get an incomplete medical record because various parts were stuck in storage or older pages had simply fallen out.
