One mother shares why the health information exchange could save your life
ANCHORAGE – All 10-year-old Garrett Evanoff wanted was an answer.
“He came home and he slammed his door and said, ‘I’m not coming out. Sign me back up for football. I don’t care about my brain,’” said Carlin Evanoff, Garrett’s mother.
Garrett was born with a brain deformity. They flew this past Thanksgiving to Seattle to see if surgery could have been an option. Garrett’s files, however, were in Anchorage.
Evanoff said, “He watched me on the phone for probably like six hours trying to get a copy of his study we needed. He just said, ‘Mom, why don’t they just send it express mail.’ Garrett, they can’t. It won’t get here fast enough. I didn’t have a really good explanation. I just said I’m sorry.”
If the hospital in Seattle were part of the new health information exchange, Evanoff would have been able to get the answers she needed for her son.
The new health information exchange is electronic file sharing between doctors and hospitals. It’s an overdue tool designed to make things efficient and eliminate problems such as the one the Evanoffs experienced.
“The field of medicine is really behind in capturing technology and the use of technology to improve access to the information. You can have a test done at one center and it can be really difficult for me to try to get access to it. It could lead to me needing to repeat the test unnecessarily, delay in having important information that can help you at the time you are here,“ said Dr. Melinda Rathkopf of the Allergy, Asthma and Immunology Center of Alaska.
The new health information exchange could also have prevented what happened to Rebecca Madison’s 90-year-old dad, who was being treated for diabetes and heart issues.
“There was an interaction between two of the drugs he was taking but neither doctor knew that the other doctor was prescribing that drug because dad didn’t tell them,” Madison said.
On the health information exchange, your electronic health record is sent out as an email attachment to the doctors who need it.
“Both the attachment and the email are encrypted. So if it were captured enroute to somewhere… the email and attachment are separately encrypted in separate ways so you couldn’t. Even if you did hack the email for example you probably couldn’t read the attachment,” said Madison
Paul Cartland, Alaska State Health Information Technology Coordinator, said not even your doctor can share your information with just anyone.
“They are not going to share information with the doc down the street because they are friends. They are going to share that information with the doc down the street because they referring him to him or her. All of the same rules that exist today apply. All that is changing is the transport,” said Cartland.
It’s a change that would have made all the difference for Carlin and her son. “It’s the future of health care. The faster we all support it and get on board, the better it’s going to be for us, for our kids, for their kids. My own experience, no body died but it sure felt it. Sure felt like it at the time,” she said.
The Evanoffs will head back down to Seattle this summer. She says she will make sure she has all she needs before they leave.
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