The so-called “sandwich generation” can get an assist from access to the electronic health records of family members, giving them the information needed to help manage the care of their loved ones.
EHR systems offer the option of letting parents of non-adult children, children of old parents and anyone else that the patient wants to share medical records with, to sign into their patient portal.
“We call that proxy access,” said Taylor Seale, telehealth and RPM product lead, for Epic Systems Corp., which by way of its leading market share has the most popular patient portal, MyChart. The patient can grant access to their chart to anyone, allowing them to see appointments, medications and visit notes from doctor’s appointments, and also interact with their caregivers, Seale said.
Another convenience for the patient and proxy is the ability to manage how providers contact you, be it telephone, email, text or through and app notification, and to use identifiers for different signers-on.
“So that ability to personalize and say, ‘here’s how I want you to reach out to me for appointment reminders or medication refill reminders,’ is … super-important” in maintaining one’s health, Seale said.
In addition, being able to add a nickname or identifier in the system can be very important, for example, Seale has the exact same first and last name as his wife.
“I always love a piece of software that lets me make that distinction,” said Seale, whose middle name is Edward while his wife’s is Joanne.