Burn those referral letters!

I just sat through my thousandth letter dictation by a specialist today and have had enough. At least this last batch were quick – the specialist clinic I was in had a ‘Rainman’ as the doctor.

Much of my interest in health IT is driven by that fact that 55 year old doctors manage to survive with minimal IT skills in a information rich profession. My dad is a good example. He can barely type or surf the net yet claims to be on top of his patients and the latest EBM management. I realized fairly quickly that IT is underutilized in medicine and, like many others, have set about trying to address the issue.

On past blogs we’ve spoken about electronic health records, patient management systems, new digital imaging tools etc. But we’ve not yet seen a good referral system. Well now we have one to use as an example.

New York City Health and Hospitals have implemented this online system for patient tracking and referral. It allows real time tracking of appointments, reports and some test results.

When they figure out how to link this thing with a souped up version of Google Health we’ll be talking!

(my thanks to Theresa Ly for ‘referring’ me to the NYC health website)