You are probably aware we are in the midst of a transition to electronic storage and exchange of health records and information. The present administration has committed to facilitate the process. As best I can determine, things are happening in a relatively disorganized manner; there are many players and many approaches; no one is quite in charge. Here’s an interesting little personal story.
A while back, when we had a prescription filled for my wife, the pharmacy gave us a personal information printout and asked us to check it out. One of the items it contained was a list of drug allergies. Maybe six or eight items were listed, including things that were news to us. We are sure we never told them to any pharmacist in that format because many of the words were completely foreign to us. We double checked with the primary care physician because prescriptions now get from them to the drugstore by some unknown to us route. (I don’t think either the folks in the doctor’s office at Buffalo Medical Group or the folks at out RiteAid know quite how this happens, and I surely don’t.)
At any rate, as far as we could tell, this list was quite inaccurate, and so, we asked to have it corrected and I believe RiteAid’s data is now correct. (I wonder how long it will stay that way.) I discussed this with the gal at RiteAid who seems most familiar with the workings of their systems. She pointed out that they have been through five different systems over the years. This was originally an independent drugstore – Thomas Drugs – in East Aurora NY. If I recall correctly, Bob Thomas sold out to Fay’s years ago, Fay’s was later acquired by Penneys, the operation was subsequently picked up by Eckerd, and Eckerd was recently purchased by RiteAid. I’m just trusting to my memory so I probably don’t have that all quite right. (As a result of this, by the way, we’ve had two RiteAid stores within a city block of each other in East Aurora for a couple years now.) Well, the point is that somewhere along the way some inaccurate, very inaccurate, data was introduced into my wife’s record. There is no way to know for sure how it got there and there may be no way to prevent it from coming back. I asked them to check my record and it’s OK.
I only know what I’ve just described. I don’t know anything about the systems involved here. I do know there are at least three: the system at Buffalo Medical Group, some unknown prescription forwarding system, and the system at RiteAid. I also know it’s pretty easy to go astray sending data from one place to another and I know that data conversion from one system to another can be messy. I think the electronic exchange of health care data is in danger of becoming an incomprehensible maze and poor data quality will be an issue. As always, I would be very interested in any comments or observations you have on this.
© Charlie Wertz, January 2009
