A lot of the doctors I meet still carry their patient charts between clinics in a bag.
I'm not judging it. For years that was the only system that made sense. The records go where the doctor goes.
We get messages from the doctors as well, telling us about their experiences. A doctor that had two clinics, the patient showed up at the other one, the secretary had to photograph the chart and send it over.
Another still had the old files on a desktop they couldn't get back to. Just recently, someone told us the photos they need for returning patients are sitting on a hard drive at the clinic.
It's the same problem.
The record is in one place, and if you're not there, you don't have it. I've written about the books version of this. Charts are the same shape.
We talk about medical records and practice management. Save time is in there too. Honestly, they just want to open the same chart at the other clinic.
The photo-and-send thing feels like a system. It isn't. Clinic 2 still doesn't have the chart. It has a picture, if the secretary picked up, if it's even the right folder. Last visit, allergies, what you actually did last time, that's still at the other desk.
What fixes it is one chart both clinics can open. Same record, not a photo of a record. The laptop that's already in the bag, instead of the folders. I don't think it matters much which tool, as long as there's exactly one of them, and it isn't tied to one room.
You don't have to scan fifteen years of paper for that. Start with the patients you already see in more than one place. Those are the photo requests. Put those visits in one place for a few weeks and clinic 2 stops calling clinic 1.
You'll know it's working the next time a Monday patient walks into the Wednesday clinic, and you open last visit without messaging the other secretary. If you can, you're done. If you can't, that's the gap.
Then the next time they walk into the other clinic, the chart is already there. That's the whole thing.
