This article continues from the article published earlier today sharing my Comments as examples of Responding to the federal government's Request For Information regarding our personal experiences with the consolidation of healthcare services in this country.
Turnover of professionals. Before consolidation, I observed that the nurses who assisted my caregiver tended to remain the same from visit to visit. Before consolidation, the nurses tended to be familiar with my chart on each successive visit, and in many cases had first-hand knowledge of what symptoms and conditions I may have presented in the past, with memories refreshed no doubt from my records including my chart. For example, I have made it a point to say when a nurse or a tech or whoever draws my blood, to say that as long as they keep talking to me, we're going to be all right, and they did. In fact, they remembered my saying that because they had heard it from me before, of course, even though my blood was not drawn regularly and still they remembered.
After consolidation, the nursing turnover was so great and often that the nurses did not know me or my chart, including my reaction to having my blood taken.
The patient portal. This innovation has been with us for years, but I do not recall it existing before my local family practitioners' office where I was a patient for some 25 years, consolidated with a private equity firm.
I resisted using the portal for a long time because I was used to my physicians contacting me, and not the other way around. I ended my resistance to the portal when the futility of resistance became obvious; after the portal went into effect, my physicians' office no longer telephone me to let me know such things as test results were ready. After consolidation and the portal took effect, I had to access their portal if I were going to know that test results, for example, were ready.
In my experience, the advent of the patient portal altered the relationship between doctor and patient. Before the portal arrived following consolidation with the private equity firm, the emphasis of my relationship with my physicians flowed from their office to me, I was the reason for their existence.
After the portal arrived following consolidation, the emphasis of that relationship flowed from me to their office and nothing, absolutely nothing including the test results example I have mentioned, could happen unless I, the patient, approached their office through the so-called patient portal and not otherwise. I learned this when I tried – unsuccessfully and often – to telephone..
Thank you for your consideration of my Comments.
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