
By HANS DUVEFELT, MD
As a family doctor I receive a lot of reports from emergency room visits, consultations and hospitalizations. Many such reports include a dozen or more blood tests, several x-rays and several prescriptions.
Ideally I would read all these reports in some detail and be more than casually familiar with what happens to my patients.
But how possible is it really to do a good job with that task?
How much time would I need to spend on this to do it well?
Is there any time at all set aside in the typical primary care provider’s schedule for this task?
I think the answers to these questions are obvious and discouraging, if not at least a little bit frightening.
10 years ago I wrote a post titled “If You Find It, You Own It” and that phrase constantly echoes in my mind. You would hope that an emergency room doctor who sees an incidental abnormal finding during a physical exam or in a lab or imaging report would either deal with it or reach out to someone else, like the primary care provider, to pass the baton – making sure the patient doesn’t get lost to followup.
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