Hi everyone, how are you going? Karen Finnin here, physiotherapist and director of
Online.Physio. So today I wanted to talk to you about medical record-keeping in
online health consultations. So the bottom line is there's no difference in
requirement of keeping records for an online consultation compared with an
in-person or face-to-face consultation. So that's the really important thing to
remember, but it's something I've been discussing with health professionals
lately quite a bit, so I thought I'd, you know, give you my thoughts. Now with
digital technology in an online consultation we have a unique
opportunity in that we can potentially keep a 100% record of everything that we
do. All the forms, all the emails, all the messages, all the images and the video
recorded consult. We can keep a record of that all. Now why would we want to do
that? Well a couple of reasons. Medico-legally this means that we have a
very thorough record, and just remember that in a lot of Indemnity cases it's
not that the therapists did the wrong thing necessarily but they didn't have
adequate records to substantiate or prove what they had or hadn't done, so
that covers that base. It's something that the patient can then access if they
want to as well to rewatch the consultation meaning their retention of
the information from that consult is potentially a lot higher. Now there are
other aspects of having a recorded video call, that can be internal training, it
can be record-keeping, that sort of thing but let's talk about why you maybe
wouldn't want to do that. Various health professions may have
different requirements around record-keeping and if we talk about
the psychology profession for example that might be content that they don't
want to be video recorded for whatever reason. They might stick to their more
traditional method of perhaps writing up notes and/or a report after the consult
So I guess the message is do what feels right for you, but don't miss
opportunities just because you gravitate towards doing it the way it's always
been done. On top of all of this, what you do need to keep in mind is that video
files, say video recorded consultation, those logistical
file types are very large and you need to consider where you're keeping those.
They are often too big as a file size to upload to your practice management
software, which is where we keep absolutely everything normally, so where
are you going to keep those video files? Now a lot of the international security
rules revolve around cloud-based storage systems, so I would say at the
very least if you have that on a password-protected or physically locked
away hard drive you can't run into any issues there in terms of it being able
to be reached in the cloud. So a few things to consider there, but consider
the opportunity of being able to have a 100% record and if that might be useful
for you in your health profession. It's something we choose to do but it's got
to be right for you as well. It's an interesting one so have a think about it
and I'll hope to see you next time. Thanks guys
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