If you went to the time and trouble of a medical diagnostic procedure, chances are ... you want to know the results. ASAP!
It's a perfectly reasonable desire. In most areas of life, getting the results of something you paid for is pretty easy. If the results are information, most organizations just send it to you -- by snail mail, email, text or whatever you've arranged. For example, think about the crucial tests you take that have so much influence on your schooling and career, things like the SAT, MCATS, LSAT, and professional certification tests. You take the test and they send you the results in a standard way.
Not so in the wonderful world of medicine! In that world, you go to considerable trouble to arrange the test, and once it's been taken ...the fun of getting the results begins!
Getting medical test results
The usual pattern of getting the results from a medical test appears to be based on the assumption that patients are both stupid and illiterate. No way can you just send the results! The patient has to make an appointment with highly qualified medical person, who then patiently explains to the patient what the results were and what they mean. Plus, there's an office visit to be paid for.
We are told, however, that there's a revolution going on with medical record transparency. In this wonderful new world, patients can access their medical records themselves!! The major EMR vendors now support a "patient portal" for making such results available online, and major hospital systems brag about it.
Hmmm, I wonder if that's how I could get my results. Oh, I remember now, Mt. Sinai has a patient portal! I'm even signed up for it! Oh, good, this should be easy...
Getting my results from the Patient Portal
The test was ordered at Mt. Sinai. It was performed at Mt. Sinai. I have a MyChart patient portal account at Mt. Sinai. This should be a piece of cake. I pull up the main screen:
Isn't it nice? The EMR software provider, Epic, has a patient portal module called MyChart, which Mt.Sinai has cleverly called My Mount Sinai Chart. All I have to do is login, and I'll surely be able to access my recent test result, just like they say!
I login. I'll spare you the details, and keep it short: the MRI report is not there.
How is this possible? What happened to "no more waiting for a phone call or letter -- view your results..."??
I have just one thought. Maybe the fact that my original doctor left Mt Sinai and that I signed up for the MRI with a new doctor at Mount Sinai confused the system. Maybe I was signed up under a different identity!?
I poke around on MyChart a bit more. In reality, I visited the Mt. Sinai radiation center 30 times over about a six week period, and had separate consults with the doctor in charge of my radiation at least four times. NONE of these visits are listed. In fact, the last visit recorded was from 2016!
MyChart is still a wonderful program, probably ready, willing and able to show me all my stuff, but probably human error resulted in me being entered as a new person. All I have to do is create a new account, and I'll find all my records.
Signing up for the patient portal account
I'll dive right in. Given how important this is, the portal is probably written to make this effective and efficient. Here goes! I click on set up new account and get to here:
What's this activation code business? I look around and find this:
Odd. "Sign up online?" I thought that's what I was already doing! At least there's something relevant for me to click. I click it and get this:
That's more stuff to enter than I've seen in a while. There's a lot that could be said about this form and how it works, but I'll just point out one unique aspect of it:
When was the last time you had to enter your county? Even better, even if you've already entered the state, you get a list of all the counties in the whole USA!
Once you get to this point in the form, you realize that the creative people who built this software have actually created an obstacle course, a long and challenging one, hoping that most people will drop out from exhaustion long before completing it. And we haven't gotten to the really good stuff yet.
Establishing identity for the patient portal
Apparently it's really, really, REALLY important to make absolutely SURE that only the person themselves signs up for chart access. After filling out the form you see above, I got my identity hammered at:
My former home:
Finally, after accurately answered all of these questions, and risking totally awful 100% identity theft if their system is compromised, I get this:
At this point, a sensible person would have given up and tried to make an appointment with a doctor, so the doctor can access the results document and essentially read it to me. But convinced as I am of my ability to read documents (egotist that I am), I decided to plunge ahead and try another path to getting the document. The next post continues the story.
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