There are a lot of things I hate about how doctors treat you but I think the one that makes me most *mad* is when doctor A refers you to doctor B, and you show up at doctor B, and they ask you about some result or other, and you say "doctor A has that" and they're like "we didn't get a copy"
If I was supposed to carry the health data with me why didn't doctor A give it to me
Anyway this is especially great because almost all doctors have no way of engaging with you other than "get an appointment, wait two months, they see you for 20 minutes" so if that result from the other doctor was actually important that boosts any kind of outcome out by another two month cycle. Hope you weren't having like, an ongoing health problem you needed resolution on or anything.
@mcc The cache-miss penalty is high in the healthcare system.
@mcc i've got this theory that the healthcare system mostly exists to congratulate healthy people for being so healthy. they get so confused when an unhealthy person shows up
@aeva @mcc as a healthy person, I concur.
@aeva @mcc if they don’t get confused, it’s because they fail to recognize the health problem and congratulate anyway

@mcc so infuriating.

over here it's all centralised into the NHS N3 network, which is a frickin godsend, but even then they do sometimes find a way to mess it up regardless.

most frustrating one I had was being sent to a rheumatology specialist (3 month lead time), be referred for a nonstandard (HLA-B27 antigen presence) blood test, have blood taken, wait a week, then find out they just ran a basic blood panel and not the actual test, so I needed to go around again.

@gsuberland i'm rather confused how it is that OHIP centralizes payment without in any way encouraging centralization of information.

instead of modernizing or streamlining this system, the liberals just want to add "AI"

@mcc so backwards.

funny how centralising the money handling is easy but centralising the patient care information is somehow impossible.

@mcc thing is, even our dentists can electronically transfer patient care records between dental surgeries, including historical x-ray imaging and exam charts and such, and they're not even a direct part of the NHS. if we can still figure that one out, nobody else has an excuse.
@gsuberland @mcc we can’t tho, my GP practice (London) has been lying both to me and to my previous practice in order to not transfer records (for 3 years!), I suspect in part because they appear to _print out, stamp, and poorly rescan_ every piece of documentation that goes into records, including emails. Outlier (I hope!), but this being possible at all is wild to me.

@mcc @gsuberland my family doctor referred me to the endo clinic, every after-visit report from my endo is basically addressed to my family doctor, and somehow my family doctor never saw a single one

and then he quit so now he never will

@mcc @gsuberland normal and functional system
@demize @gsuberland yeah my endo stuff i religiously demand a printout and keep it in a folder, i do that because i assume trans healthcare is stigmatized and will be fucked up, maybe i need to just start assuming all healthcare is fucked up
@mcc thankfully all my stuff is pretty easily accessible in MyChart (UHN is alright I guess) and also it’s mostly just “yeah she’s taking whatever hormones she wants” for now. plus a karyotyping report
@mcc there will be More Stuff soon that I’ll probably want to keep printouts of handy though…
I should buy a filing cabinet
@demize @mcc and if it won't all fit in a fireproof safe, you should probably buy a flatbed scanner and keep (encrypted, naturally) digital backups.

@mcc @gsuberland it would be nice if government were run by people who had skills besides politicking. I hate the choices being a party that's the definition of out-of-touch, a bunch of yes men led by a (rumored) lifelong criminal, a party that can barely keep more than one seat and the NDP

Having a press that actually did their damned jobs would help too. They apparently prefer to take the parties at their word and turn everything into he said/she said instead of producing facts

@gsuberland @mcc It's unceasingly weird to me that you can just ask the NHS for a blood test without any sort of referral... And that a lot of hospitals and GP surgeries will assume that "gee, I just wanted one for fun" is the default reason for you asking for one unless you mention the referral
@jsbarretto @mcc I don't know that I've ever seen that be the case. in my case they did the standard panel because that was ticked on the form (they were looking for inflammatory markers and that comes as part of the standard panel) but the lab missed the HLA-B27 antigen test in the "other" section of the form.

@jsbarretto @mcc I don't think I could go to my doctor and say "give me a blood test" with no qualifying reason, for example. and I can't go direct to the duty nurse at the surgery 'cos I need the doc to fill out the blood test form.

I could, however, get a regular GP appointment and say "hey it's been a while since I had a proper checkup, could you check my bloods and BP to make sure I'm healthy?" and get the OK there with zero hassle.

@gsuberland @mcc Interesting. My GP lets you request blood tests even without reason. Out of curiosity, are you in England or elsewhere?
@mcc this reminds me of the time my NP asked me to make an appointment when some test results were in, so I did, and she started the conversation with "You wanted to talk about this...", and I was like, "no, you asked for this follow up". And she was completely stymied as to why she would do that.
@mcc i'm so sorry this went so badly :(
@mcc I worked for an insurance company - total scam. Except one thing they did was translate all imaging so that no doctor could say they couldn't read it. My doctor B said they were going to get me to do new x-rays. I said my company might suck but they ensured I wouldn't have to do them twice... he instantly then downloaded the existing x-rays.