Going Solo? Keep track of your patients.

Have you ever sent a patient for a test or study only to have them not have it done? Have you ever had a patient lost to follow-up? Do you ever lose sleep at night worrying about what positive cytology result is floating around in the ether, unknown to you or your patient, waiting to give the patient--and you--a problem? I used to, but no longer. And that is because when I went solo I was able to really analyze in a comprehensive way how patients get lost to follow-up and why they don't comply with orders and then my staff and I developed a system to counteract this problem. We call it The No Worries Log, and here is how it works.

When I finish seeing a patient and have formulated my plan, I tell my staff to enter my orders into the outbound referral section of my practice management software, EMedware. This section is really designed for something else; to keep tabs on referrals from a primary care doc to a specialist, but I have customized it easily to fit my own needs as a specialist and a rapidly growing solo practice doc. For example, if I order a CT scan without contrast and a cytology on patient Richard Cockworthy, I tell my staff and they enter it like this: CT I-, cytology. If I send patient John Smith to a surgeon to rule-out a hernia, we log that as hernia ref to Dr J. You can accomplish the same thing with a log book and paper and pencil or with an Excel Spreedsheet, but that results in lots of wasted time and effort due to data entry duplication. Since our patient's data is already in the Emedware program, there are no issues regarding repeat data entry, and the date of the log entry is automatically noted by the program. Every few weeks I go through the list, check off labs and studies that I have returned and have my staff--or I do it--contact the non-compliant patients and gently prod them to get the tests that were ordered. Of course, we document these phone calls in the medical record.

The patients think its magic; they think that we are omnicient. We are not! They really think we are on top of things. We are! It's easy. We are simply using our existing software to its fullest extent.

This way I sleep well at night with the knowledge that I have minimized my liability risk by maximizing my power over a patient's non-compliance. It also makes for outstanding patient care and does not cost anything extra. Moreover, I can check the log from my laptop computer, while in bed at home, using a secure VPN connection, and can call the non-compliant patients from my Vonage office line that happens to be plugged in to my router at home. The caller ID that the patients sees says Dr Schoor's office.

Technology. It's wonderful!