Transcript

Mi Via: West Coast Migrant Farm Workers Receive Mobile Care and Electronic Health Record

Woman: Here we have this huge population that come from Mexico, move, migrate along this path. You know, our community comes together and provides medical care. We have this mobile van. We have the clinic. And their information leaves - it gets stuck behind.

(SPEAKING SPANISH)

Ms. Alcantar: What I do is I bring a program called Mi Via, which is an online medical record, and we have everything that your normal chart would have - like doctor visits, dental visits, medications that you’re on, allergies, family history. I mean, we have it all in there.

Woman: Seal 14.

Ms. Tomascewski: Our population tends to - you know, to travel and Mi Via - if you have Internet access, you can access their chart.

Ms. Alcantar: It’s kind of nice to have information all together, so you’re not going to different clinics and you know, having double procedures on you or finding out that one medication doesn’t work when one clinic already found that out.

Ms. Stovall: So that if they were seen by a primary care clinic here and sent to a specialist, both sites would be able to have access and add to that information.

Ms. Allen: And this is what the beauty of the Mi Via program is - that as a patient, you have a portable health record. You have access to it. Your providers have access to it, and you always can have this information readily available.

Ms. Soloman: I feel the government’s role is to perhaps focus on the privacy issue and protect the privacy of consumers using this technology. 70 percent of people surveyed about personal health records did not want their employers to be the owner of their record or give them the PHR, and the same thing with the insurance industry.

Ms. Ficco: And unfortunately, the systems that hospitals are investing in and doctors’ offices tend to be proprietary in nature...

Woman: Can I get your name?

Ms. Ficco: And not easy to automatically share and transfer that information. They’re all trying to figure out how to interoperate and transfer information easily. And yet, the Mi Via’s the perfect vehicle for doing that.

(SPEAKING SPANISH)

Ms. Stovall: Just by giving them this tool and teaching them their rights, as far as having access to their health information, it brings them into a loop that they didn’t even know was there. With Diabetes, by giving them the tool to keep track of their blood sugars - makes them pay more attention to their blood sugars, makes them pay more attention to their diet - which affects their blood sugar - and it brings them into the process. Whereas, before, a lot of times it was just, show up the doctor. Tell me what I need to do. Maybe I’ll do it and maybe I won’t. But if I have to become part, or if I am given a tool to become part of the process, I will engage more so.

Ms. Soloman: The technology is way ahead of policy. Frankly, you know, we’re afraid of our insurance companies. I don’t want my insurance company knowing if I’m monitoring my high blood pressure. Our feeling is that there’s a way to partner with these organizations but still keep the control of the personal health record in the hands of the consumer.