PCP to Coordinate All Medical Care
The PCP, or primary care provider, is your primary physician or health-care practitioner. This may be a family-practice doctor or a specialist your parents or in-laws see regularly. They may each have a different PCP. The point being, someone has to be designated as being in charge of each person's medical care.
Statistically, as people age, they require more health care. This can mean that several different doctors as well as other health-care services can be involved. As a result, there can be duplications of services as well as medications, treatments, tests, and procedures that are in direct conflict or contraindicated.
Sometimes, a physician will refer a patient to a specialist and not send copies of recent lab, X-ray, or other test results with the patient or to the new physician. Instead of asking for them, the new physician orders the same tests to be repeated. This is not only time consuming and stressful for the patient, it is not cost effective. Insurance companies have begun to crack down on this type of duplication by refusing to pay.
Without a complete list of current medications, the new doctor may order something similar or even prescribe a duplicate of a medication already being taken. Patients and family members may not even detect this if a different pharmacy is used to dispense the prescription and the pharmacist doesn't catch the duplication. If a different manufacturer of the drug is used by the new pharmacy, the pills may look very different. If a name brand is ordered and the version already being taken is the generic version, or vice versa, the duplication may not be caught either.
A specialist may be treating only a specific condition such as cardiac disease, diabetes, cancer, or kidney disease and may not be concerned with any other conditions. There could be several doctors involved in the care of your loved ones. Don't expect them to talk to each other about your loved one or even to consult in the event of a serious problem. They will most likely expect you or the patient to be managing the overall situation and informing each doctor what is being done.
The patient is ultimately responsible for his own health status and advocating for himself. It is important to discuss this situation with the primary-care practitioner and involve her in the process of overseeing all care. Copies of all aspects of care should be sent to the PCP for inclusion in one complete medical record. The PCP should be consulted for all new orders as well.
Some physicians may balk at this responsibility, but others have had to learn this role through managed-care processes, where all requests for care must be authorized by the PCP. HMOs have gotten a bad rap for this type of scenario, and rightfully so in far too many instances, but the basic philosophy that the PCP takes charge and manages the care has excellent merits in preventing errors.
