As a health care consumer with a grandmother mired in the post-acute care world, I appreciate the workflow Afoundria's ChartPath brings to doctors who need to follow patients to multiple facilities.
My grandmother, Billie, suffers from dementia and receives care at a nursing home in East Texas. She is one of thousands of Texas residents who could benefit from tools that allow doctors, nursing home staff, and family members coordinate health care decisions -- if only those doctors and facilities would use them. Instead, information and orders about Billie and thousands like her can be found buried in binders. There are separate binders for tracking weight, food intake, care plans, medications, and pressure sores.
Entwined in all that paperwork was information that Grandma was beginning to suffer from kidney failure. Pressure sores were blamed on said kidney failure. Also in a separate binder was information about her past trouble with very large kidney stones and recurrent UTIs. But because this data was not all in one place, no one except the family raised the possibility that her kidney failure and apparent pain could be due to another kidney stone...even though the cranberry extract supplement she's been on is contraindicated for patients like her -- who have been diagnosed with kidney stones.
Our family is still trying to untangle the web that just keeps getting stickier -- a urologist who retired, tracking down medical records, finding a new doctor who will see a new medicare patient -- this entire headache could have been avoided had my grandma's doctor and nursing facility used ChartPath and DataPath to track her symptoms. Her doctor would have been sent an alert about the change in her status: the lethargy, the pressure sores, the weight loss. Instead the family is the advocate, filling in the gaps between the binders, wherever they can.
It makes me wonder about those nursing home residents who do not have family standing by as advocates. Who fills in the gap for them?
-Christie McBride
