Lyme disease treatment stopped suddenly
Patient says her privacy breached
An Emerson woman is raising privacy concerns after she said her doctor was ordered by a rural regional health authority to stop treating her with intravenous antibiotics for Lyme disease.
Elizabeth Wood, who contracted the disease in the late 1980s and still suffers from its effects, said her Altona doctor was told this week to halt prolonged antibiotic treatment until Wood sees an infectious disease specialist. That could take months to arrange.
Extended periods of antibiotic treatment are controversial in the treatment of Lyme disease patients. Medical authorities frown on the practice, saying it can do more harm than good.
Wood, though, said without the treatments, she would be unable to live a normal life.
“You can’t walk. I was bedridden for years,” said the 64-year-old, who suffers from several other debilitating symptoms in the absence of treatment, including an irregular heart beat.
Wood said she was receiving intravenous treatments at an Altona clinic this week when she was told by her doctor the Southern Regional Health Authority (also known as Southern Health) had put a stop to them. In the past, she’s received the daily treatments for as long as three months at a time, she said.
She wonders how Southern Health learned of the treatments and is upset it intervened. “They’ve got their fingers on my private information. I feel that my privacy was invaded when they called my doctor.”
on February
I was started on IV antibiotics on February My doctor was phoned within 24 hours of me being put on IV medication. At which time he was told to take me off treatment by Dr. Fortier. I was not contacted by RHA but by my physician. My physician told the RHA representative that they could not get involved and he left me on the IV meds. a week later I was again told by my physician that he had been contacted by Dr. Fortier and told to remove me off the IV medication which he did. I am now not able to have a physician in Altona I will have to go to Winnipeg to see a doctor there. Who has already inform som of his patients he can no longer treat for Lyme disease
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http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&sugexp=les%3B&gs_rn=3&gs_ri=psy-ab&cp=44&gs_id=32&xhr=t&q=Dr.+Denis+Fortierhandling+difficult+patients&es_nrs=true&pf=p&tbo=d&sclient=psy-ab&oq=Dr.+Denis+Fortierhandling+difficult+patients&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&bvm=bv.42553238,d.aWc&fp=2b304979f2f46b00&biw=1316&bih=559
Access to Information and Client Service
• The EMR makes it easy to find patient
information and documents, as it is wellorganized.
Access to chart information
across the region is also anticipated to be a
significant benefit, since the linked clinics will
share the same database.
• The reporting helps the clinic to track and
monitor its panel size and to determine if it
needs to consider reducing patient load or
stop accepting new patients.
• In the paper-based environment, it was
necessary to print out stacks of paper for
billing purposes. Now, with the EMR, it is not
necessary because the information for each
claim is available in the system and it is easy
to locate only the total amount. There is a
smaller risk of losing revenue with the EMR
than with a paper-based process.
Dr. Fortier has experienced challenges when
implementing the EMR as an individual clinic
and as part of the RHA, including:
• Reaching a consensus on standardizing the
software workflows for the involved clinics
took time and effort. However, they used
a cross-functional and cross-clinic team to
work through the issues. Standardizing the
workflows is expected to make it much easier
to review patient charts regardless of what
clinic they belong to, since the information
will appear consistently.
Elizabeth Wood.