“Typesetters have proofreaders. Doctors don’t.” Let Patients Help!

Please see the “call to action” at bottom of this post: if you have a story of patients improving the chart – or a provider preventing it – put it in a comment on iHealthBeat.
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I have a new essay in iHealthbeat’s “Perspective” feature: Patient Participation: Let Patients Help With Medical Record Quality, Completeness.

This was a pretty great invitation. As it says at the bottom of the site, “iHealthBeat is published daily for the California HealthCare Foundation by The Advisory Board Company.” CHCF (the foundation) has done a ton of great work over the years at understanding the practical realities of medicine as it works out for families and communities, and The Advisory Board Company is a respected, high profile company that advises health leaders of all sorts. So when Managing Editor Kate Ackerman wrote to me – six months ago! – inviting an essay, I was thrilled:

I wanted to see if you’d be interested in writing a Perspective article for iHealthBeat on the importance of patient engagement in health IT efforts. Here’s a link to our Perspectives archives so you can get a better sense of the feature: http://www.ihealthbeat.org/perspectives-archive.aspx

One never knows why the timing works out the way it is, but it didn’t work then, and when she asked again recently, it did. Of course, back then the angle wasn’t clear to me, and this time it was: Typesetters have proofreaders; clinicians don’t. Let patients help!

If you want to support the movement, see if there’s something you could add an anecdote in the comments on that post – a story you know, first-hand or close, where patient and family engagement in the medical record prevented a disaster. Or helped in some smaller way.