Too high a number of Californians have seen in person that one of the scariest things about COVID – 19 is how it attacks the ability to breathe and even more so to speak.
In a medical emergency, every second is vital and all information is essential. But what happens when we can’t communicate because we’re unconscious and short of breath or because we don’t speak English?
As the CEO of ConsejoSano, you work to make sure healthcare works for all removing cultural barriers, I know communication barriers can mean the difference between life and death.
Doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers should know if you have severe allergies, pre-existing conditions and other critical details of your medical history to provide you with the most appropriate care. But this vital information is often locked away when it’s needed most, greatly increasing the risk of fatal errors.
Consider this: While Latinos make up the 37% of California’s population, represent more than half of the more than 44, 000 Californians who died from COVID- 19, an unfortunate result of decades of inequality in areas such as housing, education, and healthcare. With just 7, 000 Latino physicians serving the nearly 15 million Latinos in our state, language is a barrier to information from Life or death.
Every year, thousands of Californians are affected by medical errors, and this is the third leading cause of death in the United States.
Yes While technology is facilitating the secure exchange of vital medical information, that does not mean that it always occurs in a uniform and general way.
Even when medical records are being digitized, each health system, pharmacy, The laboratory and health plan continue to store them in isolation, which makes the provision of care inefficient at best, or fatal at worst.
Patients they are forced to collect and share their records and communicate key information in an emergency. And hospitals and clinics still rely on fax machines to send and receive medical records, a technology that most industries haven’t used in years 90.
And also This is why, while some areas of California remain the epicenter of the pandemic, the crucial and seemingly simple steps are not always taken, such as making sure primary care providers know when COVID test results are available. – 19 of a patient.
It is time for this situation to change.
In order to ensure that care providers To quickly access a patient’s medical history, legislators across the country have established and collaborate with state health information exchanges, including Maryland, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Arizona, but not California.
More than saving individual lives, these alliances can also help me greatly enhance public health and help fight the pandemic, especially in vulnerable communities.
By aggregating real-time data in multiple healthcare settings, from emergency rooms and pharmacies to health departments state-level health information exchange can provide health operators with valuable information on who has access to care and where, enabling them to move essential resources such as respirators, identify available beds in an intensive care unit and anticipate future hotspots.
With the complex distribution of the COVID vaccine – 19 underway, health information exchanges can also help identify vulnerable people and assist providers and public health departments to quickly contact them using reliable information in their preferred language.
These systems can help to identify the side effects of the vaccine and inform providers when their patients should receive the second dose, so that health systems that are already at capacity limit can focus on saving lives.
In January, Governor Newsom presented a budget proposal that would allow California to finally connect health information systems across the state. Accompanying him in this encouraging move, Assembly Health Committee Chairman Jim Wood announced his intentions to draft legislation to harness the potential of this type of system.
I hope the measure contributes the long-deserved and necessary push to eliminate the practice of storing medical information in isolation, which hinders patient care, and to strengthen our public health system.While COVID – 19 continues to wreak havoc, it’s time we stopped relying on fax machines and started speaking other people’s languages.
The author is the founder and CEO of ConsejoSano in Los Angeles and Board member of the California Health Data Network, Manifest MedEx. ConsejoSano is a solution focused on the participation of patients in the best use of the health system.
