Crossroad Health Center - OTR

George Adly, Summer 2017

Think about this… you are on Facebook and instead of the usual profiles, you get to see peoples’ actual patient charts (not like this violates HIPAA or anything but speaking hypothetically here). How are others going to think of you? Will they get the right glimpse of who you truly are? Will they stereotype you based on your race, gender, medical history? I spent the first month of my Urban Health Project internship at Crossroad Health Center conducting patient chart reviews. The task was to do some detective work on reasons behind emergency department usage. I saw patients through the lens of a clinician who spends most of his/her time looking at charts. Only a fraction of that time was spent speaking to the patients and getting to know them on a personal level. Did the charts tell a lot about the patients? In a way, yes they did! Just from a few minutes of screen time, a clinician can learn most of the patients’ medical history from the moment they were born. There is even a summary page so you don’t have to hit too many buttons. You see, I knew a lot before even talking to the patients! With a demanding schedule, physicians don’t have the luxury of spending 30 minutes with a patient to get the full story. The gaps in the story tend to be filled with assumptions that are based on societal views of patients demographics and medical conditions. A lot of times such assumptions are far from the truth. The second month I was fortunate enough to speak with the patients’ guardians. For the first few calls, the conversation was based on what I had already learned from the chart. Though It wasn’t in my intention to sound like an automated call soliciting answers to a questionnaire, it certainly did a few times. This was evident from how the call went (or didn’t if was hung up on, that happened a couple times). I knew I had to make some tweaks to the way I talked with the parents! The medical aspect of their life was clear as water to me from the extensive chart review! I was missing the human part of the story. The only way I would be able to extract that information was to actually be a human being myself and genuinely care for the patient. I became interested to know if they got better after the ED visit more than the reason for not using Crossroad instead! I had to be fully invested in their well-being.