A better after-visit summary

After-visit summaries are a mess. Some information is redundant, and some information is missing. Let’s face it, does it matter if all your other doctors are on that sheet of paper?

“The patient experience around these is really terrible right now,” said Dr. Eric Schneider, senior vice president for policy and research at the Commonwealth Fund. “They’re ugly, they’re dense, there’s no color,” he said. “I often hear from patients that there’s just too much information on the form and they can’t find the most relevant information because it’s buried.”

There has to be a better way. So Modern Healthcare set out to find it, asking around the industry to help create a summary that is useful for patients and providers alike. This is what we came up with.

But we’re not stopping here. We want your help to make this after-visit summary even better. Go to Modern Healthcare. com/ Visit Summary to submit your comments and critiques; we’ll take those into account and create an updated version, which we’ll publish in a month.