This is a continuation of our series MD Tech Tips intended to help physicians improve their craft and work more efficiently.
Here is a scenario encountered in multiple hospital settings by physicians. You are faxed the text results of a patient's CT scan or another type of radiology imaging -- and you want to upload that document to their medical record since it plays into your current medical decision making. Different hospitals have different techniques to make this happen. Often you have to send the paperwork to your medical records department, and they do manual uploads of the paperwork into your electronic medical record.
The short answer is, it's not easy to upload these documents to the patient's medical record instantly. But there is a way you can repurpose an EPIC app to let you do this instantaneously.
EPIC's Haiku app (for the iPhone and Android) and their Canto app (for the iPad) enable you to upload pictures into a patient's chart. Traditionally, this is used to upload images of a patient's pathology -- such as a tracking the improvement or worsening of cellulitis once a patient starts antibiotics.
But you can use the Haiku and Canto medical apps by EPIC to upload pictures of key documents as well and place them in the patient's chart. The pictures are uploaded in a secure and HIPAA-compliant fashion via EPIC. This can be a great way to store the text results of a patient's imaging that was done at an outside hospital. You can place the picture right into your MDM or other parts of the patient note as well. You also have the option to create a separate plan-of-care note and drop the picture of the imaging result there as well. With phone camera technology five or six years ago, this would not have been ideal, and the picture would probably look hazy. But with the clarity achieved on current smartphones, the images are very easy to read in the patient's chart.
Obviously, this isn't ideal for several pages of information, but for one- to two-page imaging results, it's a handy way to upload critical information into a patient's chart quickly.
This article originally appeared on iMedicalApps.com.