It was never more evident to me than today when I picked up a healthcare IT magazine from 4 years ago and compared it with the current copy that not much has changed in Health IT; we are still dealing with the obstacles of sharing a patient’s medical information. And we’re not talking about healthy patients or those concerned with privacy…this is a record of someone being transferred from an Aged Care Facility (ACF) to an Acute Facility; those who are more than willing to have their information shared. We are still not doing this electronically, what is the problem?

With all of the investment in technology infrastructure, the industry has not been successful in providing the one thing that could save lives - connecting hospitals with residential aged care facilities, so that vital health records are available to the ambulance services and clinicians, when patients are at their most vulnerable.

It is a common scenario for an ACF to send a patient to hospital with a printout of their medications & current care plan, but there is no guarantee that this ever makes it into the Emergency Department (ED) clinician’s hands, or that this information relates in any way to their current trip to ED. It is also common for aged care patients to be discharged from hospital with nothing; a discharge summary is often a distant dream and usually goes to the GP & not the Residential ACF. Often this discharge summary is missing, considering many complementary medications may have been ceased during the hospital admission - the detective work begins trying to piece together what is going on with the patient’s care & where to go from here. There was a recent example of an aged care resident who was sent to hospital with hypertension and not responding to medication, the resident/patient returns two weeks later with a pacemaker and all new medications. Having had an adverse reaction to several other medications while an inpatient, the family and the Aged Care staff ask how it happened, when the patient’s reactions to medication were already known.

The only record sent with the patient is a paper record. This is in a big manila/yellow envelope, if the ACF had been organized, otherwise they are clipped notes to the blanket when the resident is collected for transport to the hospital, some pages may be missing, no one’s fault… just the problem with pages on a clip board.

If we don’t adopt sharing of information/records electronically we will continue to cause harm to the patients we intend to care for.

We know that more patients die in hospitals each year as a result of adverse events due to medications than die on our roads, yet it continues. As consumers we expect our records to be shared electronically between our GP, diagnostic providers and a hospital they refer us to, as members of the healthcare industry we know that still doesn’t happen. That is how I know we are not MAD, not at the level that we should be after all these years. As industry leaders we need to ‘Get Loud’, demand that consumers know what to expect if they happen to arrive in hospital with a trauma. “Get Loud’ talking to consumers, young consumers, let them know that their health records are not shared, see the surprise on their face. Ask consumers to demand that their records held on a server at their GP are shared electronically.

Then we will know we are truly, Making A Difference! (MAD)