Electronic records vs. paper records. (doctor, insurance, specialist, cheap)

[VTsnowbird]

I get most of my medical care at a large medical center in the area that has been using electronic records for years if not decades. They are affiliated with some smaller hospitals in the larger regional area.
I wanted to see a specialist who works at one of these smaller hospitals. I was told I needed to fill out a questionnaire before I could get an appointment, and they sent me a 12 page PDF that I was supposed to print out, fill in, and bring or mail to them. Basically asking for my entire medical history, family history, medications, current complaints, and insurance information. ALL of which is on my e-record that is available to all doctors at this smaller hospital. As well as a confusing page about requesting my records from the larger MC and I might have to pay for that.

I decided against seeing this particular doctor and will stay with the docs in the main institution. I can't for the life of me understand why they need this paperwork, wondering if some data entry person is going to add it all to my file online AGAIN.

Does this make sense to anyone? Isn't it 2022?


ETA - my PCP is also at the smaller hospital and doesn't require any paperwork.

[Medical Lab Guy]

I have a Mac and can fill in and put a signature on any PDF document without needing to print it out. So that was the easy part.

The affiliation part is something more complicated. There can be an affiliation that does not involve the merging of ownership or merging the running of the organizations. They can remain separate financial entities. They do that with contracts. Some large hospitals have contracts with rest homes or convalescent hospitals for example.

The hospital can have contracts for a variety of reasons mainly to outsource work in order to cut costs. That happened to me when the hospital fired all of us and contracted lab work to a private lab outside of the hospital. That lab hired us all to do what we were doing before in that same hospital. So the hospital chain was affiliated with that private local lab. The hospital found out that it was cheaper to have their own lab back and so they canceled the contract and hired us all back again.

We also are affiliated with a convalescent hospital and were hired to do all of their lab work.

The computer systems in all of these are not the same hospital computer systems. There's proprietary information that is not available to contractual affiliates. There's no merging of medical information and they all have independent computer systems. There was a laboratory interface between our systems so they could see results but that's all. The funny part is that that hospital eventually upgraded to the same computer hospital program that we had in the hospital. We could not merge the two because we did not have the same ownership and we didn't want them to have access to confidential information. It's HIPAA and financial information that is guarded.

There are hospital chains out there that are run by the same organization and in that case, they use the same computer system. The managers are system hospital-wide managers. All the hospitals have the same computer system and all are interfaced with each other.

So affiliation might mean that they have a contract with the hospital but are not owned by the same hospital. That's one possibility as to why they don't have the same computer system and are not interfaced.

[Hemlock140]

I have found that it depends on the doctor as well as the hospital/office. Most of the time I can fill forms out online using the
MyChart, but one specialist actually snail mailed me a form to fill out and bring to the appointment. It may just be the personal preference of the doctor or his/her staff. It is 2022, but not everyone has embraced the current technology.