Doctors don’t control this shit come on dude
To the extent that this is true, I’d wager that this is much more about the “boomer” part than the “doctor” part.
1 Like
In Canadian hospitals the doctors complain loudly about anything they don’t like, including administrative procedures. And a lot of their complaints take the form of “I don’t like this new thing, I like the old thing”. They expect to be deferred to on a lot of matters.
Anyway, the more substantive part of my original comment was that if fax machines were truly a HIPAA issue, you would expect the issue to be limited to the US and that is not the case. I think its much more attributable to the general culture of hospitals and health care, and doctors are way more influential in hospital culture than you are implying.
Probably true but old doctor culture can be an accelerant for bad boomer attitudes.
I’ve noticed a major difference between boomer doctors (almost all white males from upper middle class backgrounds) and millennial doctors (much more diverse).
I wonder which ones like fax machines and which ones hate them?
most doctors probably don’t even know what a fax machine is, they’re not fucking micromanaging this shit.
Sure, I’m willing to concede that. But my wife is a doctor at her hospital and in the leadership team, and she worked at 3 hospitals before that also in leadership roles. The stories about the doctors getting all on everybody’s business are loltastic. I get that there is more at play here but doctors have a huge influence on hospital operations and culture. #notalldoctors etc, fine, and I am speaking from a Canadian perspective.
ask her how many faxes she has personally sent in the last year
She has handed paper files to admin assistants to fax, does that count?
The people who like fax machines might be the ones who are more likely to prefer paper books to ebooks.
no
1 Like
this is one of those things that sounds superficially plausible but I bet the correlation in reality is much weaker than you think
Certainly my perception is distorted by my wife coming home and telling me over drinks about all the whacky hijinks the doctors are getting into.
I fax shit all the time!*
*I sign pieces of paper, let the nurse/clerk fill out the details, and then the clerk faxes it.
Getting back to the point (sorry about the long diatribe about doctors, I couldn’t help myself and look at the chaos, my bad) it doesn’t seem like it’s a HIPAA issue specifically because it’s not limited to the US. My guess is that the HIPAA angle is just a truthiness narrative that people use to justify avoiding the necessary operational headache of changing a bunch of processes that currently involve transmission of data via fax. Nobody wants to be the guy that decides the fax machines shall go and then later be accountable when something goes wrong. Especially something medical with all the litigation exposure.
1 Like
Why can’t they insert physical pieces of paper into a fax machine, but receive the data electronically?
Does Canada not have it’s own version of HIPAA? I assume you can’t just casually send patient information out willy-nilly.
Nothing about that story makes sense and is either gross negligence and/or poorly remembered.
The end conclusion is fucking dumb. Pediatric appendicitis is a very tricky diagnosis for lots of reasons, especially in girls who have ovaries that commonly mimic symptoms. It’s tricky because kids are notoriously bad historians and very difficult to do abdominal exams on. What changes need to be made? You’ll note zero actual proposals. Am I supposed to radiate every 4 year old who comes in with belly pain? Shit the reason why you send so many kids home with abdominal pain is that they can come back if their pain becomes more localized.
Anyways, why this girl didn’t get a CT scan right away is beyond me. Would have done the old US (which is positive enough to get surgery to cut maybe 5% of the time) then gotten the CT. I have no idea how the abdominal XR showed it wasn’t a virus. Maybe it showed free air? Sometimes doctors fuck up is the explanation for this case.