Fixing Faxes

Jonathan shares a personal experience regarding a specialist referral, it provides an opportunity to refresh on what referrals are. In this episode Jonathan and Angela refer to the Medical Post, September 2020 issue. Topics span personal experience, referral etiquette, lost referrals, and what is really expected of the patient in the process.

Find Us Online

Angela Hapke - @angelahapke - https://www.clinnect.ca

Jonathan Bowers - @thejonotron - https://www.twostoryrobot.com

Credits

Produced by Jonathan Bowers and Angela Hapke

Music by Andrew Codeman (CC BY 3.0)

Transcript

Angela: [00:00:00] but your, desk moves up and down. Is that an issue?

Jonathan: [00:00:04] But Nope, no, no, it's not because I'm Mount to everything to the desk. Not, not to like to the wall or anything.

Angela: [00:00:11] got it. So it moves with it. Okay, that makes

Jonathan: [00:00:14] Like watch

check this out. this is sometimes how I come into meetings

welcome to the meeting.

Angela: [00:00:25] this is so weird. Your head's just slowly rising up from the bottom of the screen.

Jonathan: [00:00:33] yeah, just appear. I just,

Angela: [00:00:35] Well, you don't, you don't appearance. Like if you were in PowerPoint, it would be the slowest, The slowest, like fly in

Jonathan: [00:00:44] yeah. I fly it from the bottom. Yeah. Real slow.

Intro [00:00:48]

Jonathan: [00:30:23] shout out to Justin Jackson and, John Buddha at Transistor FM.

You're listening to Fixing Faxes, a podcast on the journey of building a digital health startup with your hosts, myself, Angela Hapke.

And I'm Jonathan Bowers. I just got back from taking Zack to an eye specialist, a referral that we had from our GP or family doctor. I'm not sure what the distinction is between a GP and a family doctor.

Angela: [00:01:11] There is a very clear distinction between, GPs and family care providers. But that is a topic for another time.

Getting a Referral to a Specialist [00:01:19]

Jonathan: [00:01:19] Okay. anyways, so, Zach, had a bit of a traumatic birth and suffered some nerve damage to his eyes. And so for the first the many months of his existence his eye didn't open quite correctly and that was concerning. and so we got referred to a specialist. Now the specialist did not let us know that they would much rather us go to a different specialist because that specialist is capable of doing the actual surgery that might be necessary. Didn't phone us, didn't find the GP. So we just phoned them many, many months later asking what's the status of this? And they said, Oh, it needs to go to a different specialist. And so we then had to go back to the GP. The GP, sent the referral to the new specialist and, anyways, it was kind of a pain in the butt. And the only reason why he caught it was because Julie phoned the specialist's office and said, I thought I would have heard from you by now and nothing. Nothing happened. anyways, like medically everything's fine. His vision is perfect. I mean not perfect. It's it's good. he has, he has, what's called a Horner's I'm saying this right Horner's syndrome, which, apparently causes people to sweat differently.

Angela: [00:02:34] Interesting.

Jonathan: [00:02:35] Um, but yeah, I don't really know much about it. Either. A friend, a friend of ours has it. and as an adult, like we, we had no idea. but anyways, yeah, the, the eyelid, has recovered well. It's, it's very difficult to see that one eye lid doesn't open quite as much as the other. It's more apparent when we look at him in a mirror because it's it's, the assymetry is wrong.

Um, and his pupil, his pupil is performing well. There's no, there's no damage in the back. He's not going to need glasses. So we're pretty excited, but it made me think of this whole Clinnect journey and referrals and having to manage, having to manage it ourselves to some

degree, to make sure that it was happening.

Angela: [00:03:13] as a father or a parent of a patient, this is a tough one. So you, so your primary care provider sent a referral, they sent a referral to a specialist that, it was probably from the primary care provider's perspective, an appropriate specialist to send it to.

Jonathan: [00:03:33] and it is, it is actually, so we went to the, to the, to the specialist that can do the surgeries. We've gone to see them twice. And then at the end, he's like, there's no need for surgery. Let's send you back to the original specialist because that's a much easier drive. And so then we'd been going and everyone's been great.

It's just the, just the logistics piece that has sucked. So everyone made the right, like it was, yeah, it was the right referral to make.

Angela: [00:03:56] Yep. It was so their primary care provider made, from their judgment, the best call to a specialist that they could have made. Yeah. That communication though, from when that specialist received that referral and saw that referral as, possibly appropriate but given the, the, the circumstances with Zach, I'm thinking that maybe there would a surgery would be needed, that that referral then should have been either forwarded to the surgeon with the indication back to your primary care provider that this referral has been forwarded to the surgeon, or that specialist should have.

Gone back to your primary care provider and said, actually in review of this patient, we think they're better off to be seen by a surgeon first just to maybe rule that out. Which was eventually what happened. Yikes. And how long, how long did you wait?

Jonathan: [00:05:03] Oh, I don't remember. It was, I want to say a month or two.

Angela: [00:05:09] So we're talking about and how old is Zach?

Jonathan: [00:05:12] How old was he? Oh my goodness. Oh,

Angela: [00:05:14] would have been only,

Jonathan: [00:05:16] One thing I've learned is that having a child, you don't remember anything about anything?

Angela: [00:05:21] that's true. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to Parenthood.

Jonathan: [00:05:25] he was quite, I mean, he was quite young when we took him the first time.

Angela: [00:05:29] So a baby,

Jonathan: [00:05:30] Yeah. Oh yeah, baby. I mean, he's not even two now. He's, he's under two and this has, we've done this for, we've gone five times, I think, to the, to the different specialists. and each with like several months in between, so

Angela: [00:05:46] Which that part is pretty typical, right. That, that follow up piece. but that initial piece had you guys not phoned, what do you think would have happened?

Jonathan: [00:05:55] Honestly, I'm not sure. I think it would have just, I think it would have just gone on forever and we wo...