If you go to a walk in health clinic, you’re in good company. These clinics and their users are growing rapidly. So, too, is their using EHRs to document your stay. That EHR use is both good and bad news.
Clinic Types
There are two basic types of these no appointment, walk in clinics: Retail Health and Urgent Care:
- Retail Health. These treat minor problems or do basic prevention that usually doesn’t require a physician visit. For example, they give flu shots, treat colds, ear infections, and strep throat, etc. The clinics are often one person operations staffed by a nurse practitioner. You can find them in stand alone settings, but more frequently now they are in major, retail chains such as Target, Wal-Mart, CVS, etc. In addition to their location accessibility, these clinics usually have evenings and weekend hours.
- Urgent Care Clinics. These perform all the services of retail clinics, and also have extended hours. Importantly they add physician services. For example, they will treat burns, sprains, or run basic lab tests. These clinics usually are part of a clinical chain or may be associated with a local hospital. Unlike retail health clinics, they generally are in their own store fronts.
While their services and settings differ, both accept health insurance. With the projected growth of the insured population under the ACA, their managers are expanding their networks.
Clinic EHR to PCP EHR Problem
Unlike practices and hospitals that have undergone, often painful, transitions from paper to EHRs, these clinics, skipped that phase and have, by and large, used EHRs from the start.
EHRs give them a major advantage. If you visit Mini-Doc Clinic in Chamblee, Georgia and then go to one in Hyattsville, Maryland, the Maryland clinic can see or electronically get your Georgia record. This eliminates redundancy and gives you an incentive to stay with a service that knows you.
If you only go to Min-Doc for care, then all your information is in one place. However, if you use the clinic and see you regular doctor too, updating your records is no small issue. Coordination of medical records is difficult enough when practices are networked or in a HIE. In the case of a clinic, especially one that you saw away from home, interface problems can compound.
With luck, the clinic you saw on vacation may use the same EHR as your doctor. For example, CVS’ Minute Clinic uses Epic. However, your clinic may use an EHR tailored to walk ins. Examples of these clinic oriented, tablet, touch optimized EHRs are:
Your physician may not have the technical ability to read the clinic’s record. Getting a hospital to import the clinic’s data would require overcoming bureaucratic, cost and systems problems for what might be a one time occurence. Odds are the clinic will fax your records to your doctor where they will be scanned or keyed in, if at all.
This is not a hypothetical issue, but one that clinic corporate execs, patient advocates and physicians are concerned about. There is no easy solution in sight.
Recently, on point, NPR’s Diane Rehm show had a good discussion of the clinic phenomena, and included the clinic to PCP EHR record issue. You can hear it on podcast. Her guests were:
- Susan Dentzer. Senior Policy Adviser, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and on-air analyst on health issues, PBS NewsHour.
- Dr. Nancy Gagliano. Chief Medical Officer, CVS MinuteClinic.
- Dr. Robert Wergin. Family Physician, Milford, Neb., and President-elect, American Academy of Family Physicians, and
- Vaughn Kauffman. Principal, PwC Health Industries.
All the actors in this issue know that the best outcome would be transparent interoperability. However, that goal is more honored in the breach, etc., for EHRs in general. The issue of clinic to PCP EHR is only at a beginning and its future is unknown.
