Jesus Fuckin Christ! My sister notified she has cancer by update of status on web page.

A couple weeks ago my sister noticed an odd painful bump on the back of her hand and went to the doc to get it checked. Because she has had skin cancer before, they decided to biopsy it.

This afternoon she got an automated email stating that the status of her online medical “chart” had been updated. Her doctor had told her that the results would be in around this time. There was a note on her chart saying (paraphrased), “The tissue analysis of your biopsy of X dated has been completed. Result: squamous cell carcinoma.”

Not one indicator of any human intervention into this notification process. Not one word of context as to what the result meant, or the odds of successful treatment and recovery. Just boilerplate saying the office call her to arrange appropriate followup, and a phone number to call if she had questions. By the end of the work day, no one had called to follow up.

As she was telling me this on the phone, I was looking it up online and was at least able to give her some reassurance, in that this type of cancer is life-threatening in less than 5% of cases. I also told her a joke that fell completely flat. First, I told her that her cancer was kind of the “middle of the road” skin cancer, more dangerous than basal cell carcinoma but less dangerous than melanoma. So if she was the Goldilocks of skin cancer, hers would be “just right”.

Ok, so I have a lousy bedside manner, but Crispy Christ on a Stick, how bad does a result have to be before they will put a human on a phone line to give that kind of news and provide some context and reassurance.

Oh, yes, lest I forget to mention the humane health care practitioner, it is the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics – the area’s premier provider of the robotic approximation of heath “care”.

Wow. That really stinks. A first I thought you meant she had updated her (FB) status to let everyone know, which would have been odd enough. But that’s the way she found out! Lousy.

That’s what I thought this thread was going to be about, too. Wow, that’s pretty…impersonal. Even my dog’s vet has the decency to call me if anything is amiss with tests.

That’s just what I thought. I was picturing those annoying Facebook updates where someone says, “OMG! Really bad news!” Followed by lots of friends enquiring what the bad news is, then they respond with something like, “Can’t discuss it, too much to take in.” After much pestering they finally let people know that their hair was died the wrong colour or something.

Anyway, that’s really bad medical service to provide results in that manner. I hope it goes ok for her.

I tested positive for an STD once and never got a call about it. Just an online report. However, I had already gotten treatment and was cured by the time the results came back (it was a minor one), so it didn’t really bother me.

Cancer or any other serious, life-altering illness should always warrant a call.

and this is the problem with everything being online - you can get instant results, but then you complain about impersonal service.

In this case - the results should not have been online until after the followup with the DR - but that isnt the world we live in with instant results and online everything.

(in case it wasn’t clear - I’m pitting the ‘everyting immediate’ and ‘lack of personal services’ as well as this particular service getting ahead of the doctor followup, which I would assume was not the intention of the doctor)

I guess it’s better than a robo-call:

The two different colors is the only I can think of to represent when those messages have more than one speaker/voice…

I’m part of an anti-social minority here and I know I would prefer this over human interaction where someone is put in a forced position to show sympathy/empathy to my condition. That said, I readily recognize that I’m a very small fragment of people that want to hear this kind of news in that manner. It’s just wrong.

I’m imagining the more serious robocalls “At the sound of the beep you have fourteen days to live. Beep.”

It’s not so much about getting sympathy but the opportunity to ask questions would be awesome I’m sure. A diagnosis with no doctor but Dr.Google to ask questions of is a sure way to drive someone crazy.

True, but at the same time, I’d rather know the prognosis than wait a day for a doctor’s time to be freed up. I’m probably also in the minority for that as well.

It’s to get the results fast and not waste time.

When real people have to make those phone calls, to patience, they get abused a lot and asked every imaginable question under the rainbow – it just takes way to long, and lots of people still don’t understand it afterwards – or it’s an inconvenient time to call, a voicemail and this verification that it’s actually you they have to give the info to and not someone else or the number just rings out etc……

If you want to call them about your results - you can and you will also schedule an appointment with your Doctor then.

I knew I should have checked my messages a week and a half ago.

My guess is that the patient website is fairly new and they haven’t gotten all the kinks worked out. You know this wouldn’t be an issue if the results were “all normal”, she’d think it was great that she already had the results and didn’t have to wait on the office to get them.

IME, no doctor’s office would ever call and say “you have cancer”. They would call and say that you needed to schedule a followup visit to get the test results. You wouldn’t find out the results until you saw the doc. Your clue that the results were not optimal would be when they called daily until you got an appt scheduled or pushed you to make an appt in the next few days rather than farther out.

It’s entirely possible that no actual human at the doc’s office has reviewed these results yet. IME, it often takes a day turn-around from the doc receiving lab results to calling the patient - even with something like this. That’s not anything new, it’s always been this way.

For instance, if the report came from the lab this afternoon, the doctor probably won’t see them until after office hours, when they review charts. So they’d make a note for the next day to call and get the patient back in. Depending on the doc’s and staff’s workload, it could take a couple of days for all of that to happen.

The change is online records and automatic updates.

Online medical info is the big thing these days, including electronic medical records within the office and connected to the lab and etc. And honestly, the software is often less than optimal, and the staff haven’t quite yet figured it out.

So they may have set up an EMR that automatically updates the patient portal with test results that come in automatically from the lab, and didn’t think about the possible consequences for these types of diagnoses.

IOW, I think this is probably just a bump in the learning curve of introducing new technology. It really sucks for you, being the one that got caught by it, but hopefully they’ll get it fixed now.

I’d imagine that she’ll be getting a call from the doc’s office to schedule a visit very soon.

i have not had experience with online charting of your health from a health provider.

when she signed up for the service it may have asked on how you want results presented to you, might it have been set to email only notification?

i think this might be an option. some people may want that delivery and privacy rather than a letter or call to the household.

My money’s on this reason. Seen it happen a lot. Patients are now getting results before the doctor who ordered the test does.

Sounds like something from the world of E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”

Results are useless without treatment, wouldn’t you say?

Oh, those lousy pesky patients who ask questions about their condition. Bad patient, bad boy!

Madison, WI is home to the most popular comprehensive (inpatient, outpatient, ER, etc) electronic medical record system in the country. I have an account with the patient portal with one hosptial system that uses it (since I’m a patient there) and I also have access as a doctor to another hospital system where I work. As far as I know, labs and imaging results must be marked as final and reviewed before they move over to the patient portal. So unless they have removed that safeguard (and I highly doubt it, this sort of SNAFU would happen many times per day) someone I the office reviews that result and released it to the portal without proper communication to the patient. Probably a nurse reviewed it, sent a message to the doctor alerting him to the abnormal result and sent a message to the front office staff to call the patient. i would guess she then accidentally released it to the portal before those other folks could do their part.

Jesus, I’m sorry. I honestly thought I had seen it all this morning when the Mr. (who is unemployed) got a similar message from Company X, where he had applied: Your application status has been changed from applied to not being considered No further data is available. At the time, I thought it was lazy and thoughtless, but compared to your sister, I guess not being employed by that crap company is not so bad after all.

This cracked me up.