I've always suspected that usage of the Shared Care Plan will spread among healthcare professionals mainly by patients asking them to use it. Here's a story from a nurse showing how this kind of spread can happen:
My name is Ida Richards, and I am one of the pre-op nurses at Pacific Rim Surgery Center. I was interviewing a patient by phone on Friday afternoon in preparation for surgery tomorrow. He asked me to access his Shared Care Plan for the information. I had to tell him that it was a new concept for me, but I was willing to look into it and learn about how to do this.
I called Jone Hoag and asked her, and she asked me to contact you on the protocol for this process. I am assuming I would have to get a password set up, and clearance, and then the patient would have to give me their password. I did not obtain his password – I wanted to see how to proceed first. He is very willing for me to do this, so let me know if it is something that can be set up.
Thank you. I think this has great potential for the patients, when we get this set up.
This is an excellent example of an empowered patient realizing that he didn't necessarily have to fill out yet another admission form asking for all the same information as the last one he filled out: "All that information can be found accurate and up-to-date online in my Shared Care Plan!"
When I called Ida to orient her, she was very impressed at how easy it was for her to login (using her existing NT login) and use the application. In a follow up email, she added:
I did access the Shared Care Plan and found it to be wonderful! The gentleman ended up not having the surgery at our Center, but it was nice to learn the process and to save him the effort of retelling all of his history. I will look forward to having more patients have this option available to them as they gain knowledge and comfort in this new techno age! Thank you, Ida
As a result of this story, we started seeing more clearly the opportunities that might be possible with the Shared Care Plan. For example, our community has already agreed to standardize the "Patient Health History Questionnaire" that all patients have to fill out every time they need to have a procedure done. Wouldn't it be nice if this long and involved questionnaire could be automatically extracted from the Shared Care Plan when needed instead of asking patients to fill it out time and time again?
How many of the multiple forms used in our healthcare community could be supplemented with information from the Shared Care Plan? Imagine if patients only had to fill out forms that asked for information not already available in the Shared Care Plan: how much time, aggravation and guesswork would be saved if patients didn't have to write out their medication lists and diagnoses every time they had an encounter with system? Aiming toward having fewer and standardized forms throughout our healthcare community and having fewer data sources from which to fill them out is crucial for everyone's sanity, both patient and healthcare professionals, in this age of being overloaded by inaccurate, out-of-date, and isolated silos of information.
Thank you to the patient who was willing to ask a healthcare professional to try something new, and to Ida for being so willing to try it!
