Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Medical offices doing business with Vancouver General Hospital have had an interesting experience recently. For reasons known only to management, VGH decided that it would like to have two firms competing to deliver its lab reports to physician offices.
Vancouver General has been a Medinet client since 1991. As far as we can tell (and we have the nice letter to confirm it) we do a pretty good job of carrying lab results from the hospital to our client offices. While much change is on the horizon, there doesn't seem to be a pressing need to change things around, at least until the new major projects come on stream. But change we have, for better or worse.
No question we do some things differently from our competitor. Medinet is designed to deliver lab data quickly and conveniently, so that it can printed and stuck into the patient chart or inserted electronically into the office EMR system, if there is one. We don't allow you to decide whether or not to print reports. Reason is that our sending lab clients want to make sure that everything they send is charted, so we designed our software to enforce that.
And for a long time, we didn't offer a look-up system, so if someone lost a result, it was a nuisance to get another copy from the lab. Happily, we've just introduced our LabTrack product, which allows all Medinet users to search back through the system by patient name or PHN and pull up old reports.
So we think the playing field is pretty level.
Back to Paper Everywhere! When we first heard about the decision to bring in our competitor, after we got over our surprise, (no one had indicated that this was in the cards) we wrote and asked for details. The deal was that Vancouver Coastal would "provide notification to every physician that is affected that they now have a choice of delivery . . ." So far so good. But two days before we got the letter, VGH started sending all its reports to us and to our competitor. Duplicates and paper everywhere!
It's a larger problem than it appears. Seems that our competitor isn't able to carry anatomical pathology over its system. So offices were having just a part of their stream from VGH duplicated, and now, even if they want to use our competitor, they have to check through all the reports each morning and separate out the anatomical pathology results to make sure nothing is lost.
We don't know what happened. The VGH letter said that, "over the next two months VCH will contact our affected physicians and inquire as to their preferred reporting route." and "As feedback is received, VCH will begin delivering laboratory reports . . . ." But it all started last Monday morning!
Our people got lots of calls, asking for an explanation of the duplicates, and wondering what had happened to our easy, fast and convenient delivery service. Once we figured it out, we got a letter of our own out. It provides a way to turn off the duplicates. So far, we've had over 250 requests, which we have forwarded back to VGH. We're not sure whether the lab is acting on this information, but we sure hope so.
We've heard on the street that the duplicates are going to continue for another week. We're not sure why, and we hate being caught in this process. At the moment, we're not hearing much from the lab at VGH, but our hope is that they can modify their system a bit, and get some control over the reports they're shipping out.
More news when we have some.
jrc
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