>> MICHELLE: Hi, my name is Michelle Basco,I'm credentialed as an RHIA, and I went to Saint Louis University where I got my bachelors
in science - bachelors of science in health informatics and information management. I'm
the Personal Health Record Coordinator. My main responsibility is really assisting
our patients and families in registering for a PHR, which is so cool because my interaction
is really directly with our patients and families, I don't have to speak with just our staff,
I get to really see all of the great things that we're doing, and I get to see them being
so grateful and so thankful for it. Although I interact with all of our staff
in the HIM department on a daily basis, I.
Feel like my main responsibility is interacting
and communicating constantly with our patients and families - making sure that their personal
health record is updated, and ensuring that if they have any questions, they're more than
welcome to come to me, I want them to feel like they can call me even if it's something
silly like, oh I need to reset my password. No worries, call me, we'll work on it. Right now our PHR population for the pilot
is at 13 patients, but I also help out with what we call My Chart, which is an EPIC product,
and there we have many many of our patient population. 20,000! I haven't actually been asked can you interpret
something such as a lab value, or can you tell me why this medication has been changed,
but that's also because I reiterate to our patients and families a lot, even before I
sign them up, I am not your physician, you need to speak with them about anything medically,
and I let them know if you have questions along the lines of where do I go to find my
lab values, you ask me.
If you want to understand them, you have to ask a doctor. I've been very lucky. As soon as I graduated,
I actually emailed Katherine Lusk who was the president of TXHIMA if there was anything
I could volunteer for, and they were looking for volunteers for the personal health record
project, and I guess I just got very very lucky, and I also showed a lot of enthusiasm
for it - maybe too much [LAUGHTER] and she, I guess she just decided that I might be a
good fit for Children's. I really believe that not only do they need
the things that we learn from our HIM programs, it's very good, I think those programs show
us the holistic view of how healthcare works, and how every little thing we do is important,
but I also think the soft skills we don't get from school really take it that much further.
Being able to project yourself in a pleasant, yet assertive manner, that's really important.
It's difficult to teach someone how to communicate your message across, it's difficult to teach
someone how to be patient.
I get a lot of phone calls for the same thing on an almost
daily basis, and a lot of it is, it's just being patient with our families, saying hey
I'm going to sit with you and reset your password, I'll show you again how to get to, you know,
your labs, your x-rays, your radiology reports, etc. In those things, so what would make people
most successful in this career would be having those better soft skills. Well, I really do hope that it gets bigger,
I really want to let those patients and families know despite how large the population gets
that they are important to me, they are important to Children's, and I feel like a lot of the
reason why parents don't really sign up for something electronic is because they feel
like it's just one less person they won't really be able to have that human connection.
I want them to feel like they can always come to us, and Children's really does care - we
really do. So I don't want to deter from what I've been doing, I communicate with them the
way that it's best, I ask them do they prefer email, do they prefer phone calls, and I'll
go kind of based on that.
I'm not going to change that, I want it to go with what works
for them. We have volunteers, and those volunteers they're
fantastic, we have student ones that came in this summer for only eight weeks, and we
have a year-long one who is an adult, and what they do is they kind of go out to our
clinical waiting areas, and then they'll speak with our patients and families and they'll
ask them, oh, have you heard about My Chart? And then parents and families look a little
confused because they haven't really heard of it, and then when we explain to them it's
a way for you to view parts of your medical record online, they love it. And then we tell
them you can communicate with your provider, and they want to be signed up that day. So
those volunteers will actually sit with our patients and families and help them walk through
the process of getting registered and then adding a child, and then they kind of also,
if they have questions, like I don't know -I can't find the app, how do I find that
on my phone? Can you please help me? That's what our volunteers do, they sit with them,
and then they'll just download the app and make sure everything is okay, and then they
ask the next patient or family.
In regards to the PHR, I like to start out
my day by running a report and it has all of my patients, my pilot patients, and then
I see if there has been any changes or updates, if there are I will generate a new continuity
of care document and send it to their PHR, and I'll also contact the parent and family
and walk them through downloading it to their phone [LAUGHTER] and that's pretty much what
I do on a daily basis, and I try to troubleshoot their technological issues if there are any. The biggest one is patient and family education
on all of the resources that they have. Sometimes they kind of don't believe me when I say that
you can view your records online [LAUGHTER] and I think that's a really big part of something,
we use technology every single day, we have our phones with us every day, why can't we
use it for healthcare, why can't we use it to improve their lives? So it think that that's
the biggest challenge, is really getting them educated on the fact that you can use your
phone for more than just, you know downloading some games, but you can really use it to make
your life better. Work very very hard, thank your teachers,
they've put up with you..
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