Does your doctor/clinic/hospital use MyChart? Are you concerned about any consolidation on a single vendor for medical record administration?
Posted by twowrist@reddit | AskAnAmerican | View on Reddit | 46 comments
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i-love-freesias@reddit
Absolutely hate it. A wrong or old diagnosis will follow you forever.
tara_tara_tara@reddit
I see several different providers at the same hospital and I love being able to get all of my information in one place.
All of those places you described are part of the same hospital system. Why wouldn’t they share the same software systems? It makes perfect sense.
If you go to the ER at Mass General, they have the information they need from BI or Fenway so they can give you the safest treatment. It is to your advantage to have all of your providers know what medications you’re on, any allergies you have, if you have something like a pacemaker or a heart condition.
twowrist@reddit (OP)
No, they're not. Beth Israel and Mass General are two different systems. Fenway is an affiliate.
Fenway lost the online records for patients when they first made the switch, forcing them to reopen the old system as read-only. Beth Israel had lost my medications for unknown reasons, so they contacted my PCP at Fenway, but since most of my meds are prescribed by my cardiologist, Fenway wound up calling me to confirm.
I wear a warning bracelet because I’m on Eliquis and keep my records on my iPhone.
tara_tara_tara@reddit
Yes, I was thinking of BW, not BI.
People have already mentioned that MyChart is the client facing part of Epic. They are notorious for bad rollouts and losing data.
I go to TMC and the same thing happened there when they switched a couple of years ago.
One of the major selling points of Epic is that patient information is available to any medical provider who also uses it. You could be at a hospital in Oregon and if they use Epic, they can see your patient records.
You think that’s a bad thing but I think that’s a good thing.
ketamineburner@reddit
I hate it. I'm a health provider who used to use a large EMR at work. I could see everything about everybody. I go out of my way to see private doctors whenever possible.
MuppetManiac@reddit
My doctors overwhelmingly use MyChart and it’s ridiculously convenient. I love it.
ShermAbroad@reddit
I work at a clinic in the Northeast, so I think I can help. Each individual record is kept by the hospital group that facilitates your care. We do also use Mychart as patient interface.
You have to login separately for each of those. In Mychart, you login to the hospital group’s portal.
We share information with other hospital groups through what’s called “Care everywhere.” You have the ability to request each hospital group no longer shares information. So, for example, you can ask Fenway not to share information with other hospital groups. Every time they want to access information, they will need to make a request (either by Fax or through care everywhere), leaving a paper trail (and in the case of care everywhere, you’ll need to sign the permission).
twowrist@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the info.
omega884@reddit
Yes and yes.
I worry about consolidation because of single point of failure vulnerability.
I worry because sometimes patients need to be able to get away from prior diagnosis to get a fresh look from a new doctor. EHRs make it easy for your old diagnosis to follow you and for doctors to be influenced by those old diagnosis even if they try not to be.
I worry because often the records are incorrect or muddled by acute treatments for things, and too many people implicitly trust the computer to always be right.
I worry because any database of information becomes a target of law enforcement investigations, and I believe that the optimum level of crime and law breaking in society is not 0. People need to be able to get treatment for things without fear that what they disclose to their doctors will become available to law enforcement or realistically any other interested party that will visit negative consequences on the person seeking treatment. Likewise, doctors occasionally need to go "off label" or otherwise deviate from normal treatment paths because humans are messy and complex creatures and not everything needs to be or should be recorded for other people.
Unfortunately, I also don't think it's possible to avoid this consolidation. The government is strongly pushing for EHRs and EHR software is HARD. Computes like clean, discrete, well defined things. Patients and their medical histories are anything but clean, discrete and well defined. Patients don't have conversations with their doctors in clearly delineated orders, and even when they do, each patient does it differently. And no one is going to buy just a fancy electronic filing cabinet, so your EHR needs to do cross checks, and integrate with billing, and scheduling and on and on. And it all needs to comply with various laws that change all the time, and special cases happen everywhere. Since EHR is hard, and since doctors aren't exactly going to be hiring their own IT workers to build up custom EHR solutions, consolidation is inevitable.
Fighting the consolidation will be a losing battle. The focus is going to have to be on mitigating the effects of consolidation.
Puzzled-Basil3913@reddit
The governor in the state where I live granted Public Safety access to the Health Information Exchange for prison use except they didn't identify ONLY prisoners. There also doesn't appear to be any oversight of those employees.
pigeontheoneandonly@reddit
I actually love mychart. I love that all my providers can see my complete medical history and make relevant decisions based on that information. I love that I don't have to educate my providers on everything that is going on in my medical situation.
Detonation@reddit
No, none of my doctors use it as far as I'm aware but as someone with a lot of different medical issues over the past few years (RA/SA/cancer/partial thyroidectomy/insomnia) having consolidated information would make things a lot easier on me. I have my PCP, a Pulmonologist, an Endocrinologist and a Rheumatologist that I currently see multiple times a year. Not even counting past specialists that I've seen such as a Neurologist and a Cardiologist. Having to make sure all of them get my charts would save me some hassle and time. There have been moments where one of them didn't get results that I requested be sent to them for example.
BankManager69420@reddit
Idk what software my doctor uses. Honestly I never really thought of it.
IceManYurt@reddit
Nope, I figure my information has been leaked from every employer from the federal government and down.
So what's is matter?
Spinelli-Wuz-My-Idol@reddit
My dad died recently and he wasn’t able to go to the doctor recently because he couldn’t log into his MyChart.
I told him repeatedly to go to the doctor because his legs were swollen. He tried to call the doctor and he tried to go in person. Both times they told him to go to MyChart to schedule an appointment. He tried to go on and tried to reset his password and it didn’t work. No valuable tech support either.
MyChart isn’t the reason he died, but the fact that the platform essentially made it hard for him to get care because the hospital deferred to it so much makes me angry.
Positive-Avocado-881@reddit
Your doctors are a decade behind tbh. I love MyChart because they can just see everything and my PCP can also see how my specialists are treating me so everyone is on the same page. All test results and bloodwork are shared with everyone
cohrt@reddit
how the fuck should i know what my doctor uses?
twowrist@reddit (OP)
You'd know because they'd have you do appointments and pre-checkin as well as getting results and messages all with this app. Previously Beth Israel had Patientsite, but I don't know if that was home grown or a different software company.
Welpe@reddit
I’m much more worried about access to my stuff than medical leaks. Maybe this changes if you don’t have many medical issues or frequent doctor visits but I would take it any day of the week for interoperability. Having to play the telephone game for records was a fucking NIGHTMARE before charts started being combined.
But I’m just a peasant disable person who is constantly in doctors offices and admitted to hospitals, like I said it may look different from the privileged.
GustavusAdolphin@reddit
I feel less concerned about it thanI would about any other company who consolidates 80% of any market.
MyChart is owned by Epic Systems, which is a company that is employee-owned, not sold in shares to buyers looking to get equity in the company and make a quick buck in trading.
twowrist@reddit (OP)
I didn’t know that. Thanks.
BirriaBoss@reddit
Yes and it’s great. I love that my doctors are now connected.
tcrhs@reddit
Yes, and yes.
AutumnalSunshine@reddit
I can either have my medical records in a dozen places that can be hacked and where some of my doctors can't see them or I can have it in one place for hacking where all my doctors can see it.
jub-jub-bird@reddit
Yes.
No.
MaggieNFredders@reddit
I look forward to the day every medical facility in the US has to have a computer system that communicates with all others. Mychart is a great first step.
inbigtreble30@reddit
Your medical records are probably already stored on Epic. MyChart just allows you easier access to them. Epic has had the bulk of electronic medical records market share for a long time.
therlwl@reddit
Yes and no
iapetus3141@reddit
Beth Israel and MGB have different instances of MyChart.
FivebyFive@reddit
Yes.
And yes 100%.
All charts, and more and more facilities consolidating under single organizations.
They'll be able to fix prices and if they're all like the hospital systems in my area somehow both piss off doctors and provide the least possible amount of care to patients.
It's bad.
Look at Real Page and what they did to Atlanta rental prices and landlord standards. Now imagine that's your hospital system.
CupBeEmpty@reddit
Yes and no.
It’s a business deal. Same reason I don’t worry about gmail or my one point of service for my insurance.
ljd09@reddit
Yes they use MyChart. Nope, I don’t worry about it. I’ve found incredibly useful to have all my providers connected about my health care.
captainstormy@reddit
Honestly it's a good thing. I've been dealing with some health issues over the past few months. I've seen my PCP, a urologist, cardio doctor, infection disease and I've been admitted into the hospital.
The fact that they all had access to all of the tests, medications, notes and everything from all the other doctors was really helpful.
piwithekiwi@reddit
I could care less, and I care very little already.
virtual_human@reddit
I like my doctors being connected to each other.
okiewxchaser@reddit
MyChart is a product produced by the company Epic which is in use by many healthcare systems. However, they are not the only company in this space with other products such as Cerner also in use widely
therealjerseytom@reddit
Just because they're using MyChart doesn't mean that they don't have backups, a mirrored system, that it's just an interface to some different backend that they could change at a later time.
TheBimpo@reddit
Yes.
Not really.
This is some first world problem stuff. I don't understand why the average person would lose sleep over this. Our entire lives are interconnected through tons of data that goes in every direction.
One of my providers, Ascension, was recently attacked by hackers. What am I supposed to do, as a patient, to do anything about this? Spend my free time drafting letters to my legislators to craft bills in our state house?
No man, I just don't care, at all.
Subvet98@reddit
I think the concern is less about security and more about consolidation. As a lot of businesses saw in the last week having all you eggs in one basket.
SkiingAway@reddit
That's more about backups and disaster recovery plans, IMO.
There are plenty of orgs that were impacted last week and got their shit together quickly and with pretty limited impacts.
The airlines and some of the other horror stories are notorious for cutting corners on IT and this is another time where it came back to haunt them.
twowrist@reddit (OP)
Mass General had to shut down all non-emergency operations due to the recent failure. I’m just lucky that Beth Israel, although impacted, didn’t have to cancel routine stuff.
TheBimpo@reddit
Yeah it took me a month to get test results. What am I supposed to do about it? I'm not going to worry about it, I have stuff to do, like answer questions in this sub.
Curmudgy@reddit
I kind of worry about monopolization. Competition helps software products improve. Otherwise they stay stagnant.
Sirhc978@reddit
While any app like that could be vulnerable to leaks, doctors should have a way to access your information no matter where you are in the US.
OhThrowed@reddit
In the last month I've seen 4 different doctors. I don't know what software they're using, but each one of them had my chart from the others, including medications. I actually feel a bit safer knowing that info is shared between them and not reliant on my memory.
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