Healthcare - Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula

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“We have 120 patients signed up now,” Salgado says, “and we want more.”
Among those signed up for PHIL is Maureen Whalen, herself a medical office manager
for a local dentist. When Wesley described the program to her and gave her a sign-up
form, Whalen was resistant. “At first I thought, ‘Oh, no, I’m not going to do this.’”
But she has been a patient of Wesley’s for about 5 years and trusts her judgment.
“Dr. Wesley thinks this is the way to go,” Whalen says. “She says it’s the future.”
And after using it just a short while, Whalen thinks PHIL is already a useful tool today.
She has been managing several health issues, one of which requires regular contact
with the office. Between visits, she’s found that e-mail can resolve questions that arise.
It’s turned out to be easy and effective to communicate via e-mail rather than phone.
“This way I type the message in, and I know it says exactly what I want it to say,”
she says.
Wesley became a believer in electronic medical records while she was doing her residency
at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, which was ahead of its time, already linking patient
information through technology in the 1990s. When she arrived in Monterey 9 years
ago, she found herself back in a paper world.
“It was so piecemeal,” she says. “You had to call other offices to get information on
patients. People were faxing things. Charts were getting lost.”
When she made plans to open her own practice in 2006, she commited to doing it
with an electronic record system and says, “It was the best decision I ever made.”
Her old paper records were digitized and everything new is entered directly onto
a computer.
“It has afforded me such a different experience with my patients,” she says. “I’m not
looking around for a chart, lab results, X-rays, family history, or medical history, and I
can do an update (electronically) as I’m talking to them.”