Modern medicine is built on specialisation and as the patient goes from GP to specialist to care takers and back to GP, information travels in pieces, often times in the post, and most significantly separate from the patient. As PKB’s CEO Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli tells Telegraph “patients are best placed to be in control of their medical records, because they are the only ones who have been to all the consultations.”
So what does it look like if patients were given access to their records?
The patient can get immediate access to an up-to-date version of his or her record via a computer or smartphone, and can grant other people access to their record, linking together the care teams that treat them. Once the appropriate people are linked up, [the entire healthcare team] all have a single view of the patient’s record, making correct treatment and diagnosis much easier.
Dr. Al-Ubaydli also addresses the concerns medical professionals have around a new system, any type of electronic medical record. Many clinicians fear the time commitment that might come with patients who can directly message their clinicians through an app described above. However, realistically
the messaging system actually saves doctors’ time in the long run, because patients stop calling the surgery and start canceling ‘just in case’ appointments. Patients Know Best is able to integrate with the doctor’s own software systems, so any notes they make during a consultation are automatically uploaded to the patient’s record.
The original article can be found here and a PDF version is here.