Reasons a Personal Health Record Can Reduce Your Medical Expense
The use of a personal health record can reduce health costs because much of the money spent on health care is used to acquire the data needed for diagnosis and appropriate treatment. With the adoption of the Health Care Reform Act that will expand medical coverage to 32 million people by 2019, more patients will establish new doctor/patient relationships and the flow of health information will probably increase exponentially.
Although in recent years, physicians have been striving to purchase and use electronic health record programs for managing patient health data in the hope of having a centralized repository of patient’s health data. Due to differences in practice and documentation styles, a central database would not contain all the updated data in real time to meet the health needs of individual patients in all health care settings. Therefore, the best warehouse for your health information is your own personal health record.
A scenario illustrating the cost of producing and exchanging medical data is the initial visit of a new patient to establish a doctor/patient relationship. A doctor who sees a patient at a first meeting needs historical information that is often missing because the patient is not informed and/or because previous treatment records have not been requested, requested but not received or requested and received but illegible. The new physician will often need approximate dates of diagnoses, approximate dates, and results of previous tests, as well as approximate dates of hospitalizations with some details of care provided. If this information is not available, some doctors will order tests that he or she might not otherwise order if the necessary information was available at the time of the patient's visit. The net result is an extra expense for the patient or at the very least another cog in the wheel of increasing health care costs.
Many diagnoses and treatment plans are based on subjective information, that is, information transmitted by the patient. For example, in the assessment of chest pain, a physician usually needs to know when and how the pain started, the location of the pain, the frequency of the pain, the duration of the pain, the intensity of the pain, the quality of the pain (cramps, burns, tingling, etc.), which makes it better, which brings it, which makes it worse, and other symptoms associated with pain before deciding to admit the patient to the hospital to rule out a heart attack or whether to treat the patient for acid reflux outside the hospital. However, on a number of occasions, due to poor preparation and/or nervousness, patients feel put on the spot when asked about their symptoms and conditions. By recording information about your health conditions and symptoms to be discussed during a future visit to the doctor, a patient is better prepared to visit with useful information that can reduce expenses by minimizing excessive dependence on tests. In addition, the information recorded is likely to be more accurate than information that has not been recorded and therefore more likely to maximize the quality of care received.
A personal health record could also reduce health expenses during follow-up or illness visits, as the well-designed software allows the patient to create pre-visit notes and diary notes on new problems and established problems, which can be brought to the doctor during a visit. In addition, by updating your health data in the personal health record, you will be better prepared to answer questions that will be presented at a doctor's visit in future.
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