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Gene D's avatar

The health care industry created a tool for patient/consumers, but the time in my day did not double to address my “bucket”. Now, there is a parallel universe that occurs simultaneously of scheduled in-person visits and the remote/portal world. Sadly, my parallel universe self never shows up. Mychart work is a full time work. The medical assistants who filter these messages in our organization do not have the ability (I do not expect them to) to even triage and handle simple clinical matters. They get forwarded to me with “please advise”.

It used to be the EMR as the source of burnout. Now that we’ve gotten better with it, this comes along.

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Greg Matthews's avatar

This is fascinating ... When I first read the headline, I thought it must be a joke. Surely we wouldn't charge patients to use a messaging platform! But as I thought about what that could do to clinicians' inboxes, I started to really get it. SOME kind of triage is critical - there is no way a clinician should be the first one to go through the inbox. Would it also help to have a (relatively small) character limit to force patients to be concise? Or would they simply spread their issue over a dozen messages which seems worse)?

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