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by killerbat00 3601 days ago
It appears that PatientBank acts as a decentralized medical records/Release of Information office that may communicate with a number of physicians and hospitals. I'm curious though, how are you collecting the medical records? Are these interfaced directly from EHRs, or some other method? Do you handle releasing to 3rd parties (legal, etc); the article seems to hint that it's directly to patients and immediate family. Lastly, when a patient has shared their records with a new physician via PatientBank, is there any functionality for exporting these records into the physician's organization's EHR? Or will relevant data need to be manually copied into the new chart?
1 comments

Great questions! So while the way a user orders medical records on PatientBank is the same across all U.S. hospitals, we have 5-6 different ways hospitals can fulfill those orders. These vary from fax or even snail mail to integrations. We actually opened up a lot of our performance data from hospitals here, if you're interested: https://www.patientbank.us/stats/about!
About exporting the data we gather to a new PHR and integrating the new information to patient's existing chart:

There seems to be a couple options!

1) Once we gather your records, we will work on creating a shareable summary of your health history. In that case, the physician can look at that summary via our web portal.

2) In many cases, most EHRs support the upload of PDFs. So, the documents you share can be "integrated" to hospital's EHR. This already happens in large hospital networks when hospitals gather medical records on behalf of patients before their appointments! When hospitals receive the records via fax or mail, they scan the pages to the EHR. Obviously, in the future, easier ways to export data (via EHR integrations) could be extremely valuable to patients and physicians!

In general most providers are never going to read through a bunch of scanned pages exported from another provider's chart. They just don't have enough time.