When you go to the doctor, there’s always a record of your visit. Whether it’s just a routine physical exam or you end up having tests completed, your doctor will have their notes recorded for future use, and you may wonder what they do with that information. Understanding how medical facilities track your care can help you to better discover how your doctor is coordinating your care.
Electronic Health Records
If you’ve ever gone to a new doctor’s office and wondered how they know so much about your health, such as your allergies and medications, it’s due to an electronic health record database. As computer technology has grown over the last few decades, medical records can be easily accessed by your healthcare professional. The actual recording of your data is done with medical coding solutions. This way, only your doctor and relevant health staff can read about your care. This helps to allow doctors to see your entire patient history and relevant medical facts in a glance.
Online Health Record Access
Technology doesn’t just stop at helping health care professionals. Online health records are now also able to be accessed by patients. Documents like referral forms and test results can be viewed and downloaded in patient portals. This makes life simple for patients who need to get copies of their test results or print out a referral form for a specialist.
Insurance Billing
Health insurance can be overwhelming, to say the least. There are many procedures and levels of care specified throughout each policy, trying to figure out what’s covered and what’s not can get quite confusing. Medical facilities will keep track of your insurance information and do the billing for you. They’ll collect your necessary co-pay and let you know when your insurance company won’t cover a specific bill.
Electronic Prescriptions
Years ago, you physically had to take a piece of paper into the pharmacy and wait for your prescription to be filled. Now, you no longer have to carry around that annoying piece of paper and you can get updated when your prescription is filled and ready to go. Electronic prescriptions allow doctors to send an official prescription to the pharmacy of your choice in seconds. Medical facilities are getting better at coordinating and tracking patient care due to the major advantages that new technology provides. From electronic prescriptions to electronic health records, all your information can be easily tracked in online databases. Next time you visit a medical facility, notice the difference that this technology has made in the way your care is handled.
