There are many areas where customer service is lacking in healthcare, but few are more egregious than the medical records request process. It’s frustratingly slow, needlessly opaque, and contributes to patient safety issues and staff burnout. And it’s making most of our health systems look bad.
Today’s guest is not just calling for a better customer service experience in the medical records request process… she is creating the tool to help get it done.
Grace Cordovano is a board-certified patient advocate who knows the medical records process inside and out. She’s helped countless patients navigate the health system and has felt the needless pain of the medical requests process firsthand. Over and over and over again. Now, she’s teamed up with our own Shahid Shah to build Unblock Health.
Unblock Health is a comprehensive suite of patient advocacy services designed for patients and consumers who are determined to be empowered in their health care journey and are no longer willing to accept traditional barriers to their information. And it will help Health Information Management (HIM) professionals track medical record requests and process them more efficiently too.
This is one of the lowest hanging fruits in healthcare transformation. And one that could immediately, and drastically improve the patient experience.
Dr. Grace Cordovano, BCPA
“Eliminating Patient Administrative Burden (PAB) is the next customer service frontier in healthcare.”
Upon recognizing significant unmet needs and challenges in patients’ experiences throughout their cancer diagnosis, Dr. Grace Cordovano, BCPA, founded Enlightening Results in 2010. As the culmination of her life’s experiential learning and education, Dr. Cordovano is dedicated to fostering personalized patient advocacy services, specializing in the oncology space. She strategically guides patients & their carepartners through survivorship or end-of-life care planning with empathy, ensuring they are armed with the most pertinent, medically credible, easy-to-understand information and tools to make empowered decisions about their care. She amplifies that treatment planning must focus on treating the whole person, not just a clinical diagnosis. She is an advocate for leveraging digital technologies to enhance treatment of the whole person in the context of life-altering diagnoses as well as for digital health and digital technologies to meet patients where they are.
With over 20 years of advocacy experience, she thoroughly understands the challenges patients face with Patient Administrative Burden (PAB). Dr. Cordovano co-founded Unblock Health to transform patient access workflows, empower all patients to exercise their patient access rights, while reducing PAB. She brings the patient and carepartner’s voice to a national policy-making level, having served as a member of the U.S. Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) Taskforce, currently serving on the HITAC Interoperability Standards Work Group, as a member of the HIMSS Public Policy Committee, co-chairing the Patient Workgroup of the Protecting Privacy to Promote Interoperability (PP2PI), and a frequent contributor to various Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) initiatives and the HL7 Patient Empowerment work group.
Dr. Cordovano completed her Master’s and Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY). She is a board-certified patient advocate via the international credentialing of the Patient Advocate Certification Board. She served as one of 5 national e-patient ambassadors for the Coalition of Compassionate Care of California, a PCORI research project funded by the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award. Dr. Cordovano has been repeatedly recognized as Patient Advocate of the Year. She has been featured in StatNews, Medscape, KevinMD, Tincture, The Health Care Blog, U.S. News & World Report, Kaiser Health News, etc.
Follow her on Twitter at @GraceCordovano.
Unblock Health
UNBLOCK HEALTH IS REVOLUTIONIZING PATIENT AUTONOMY AND HEALTHCARE CONSUMERISM.
Unblock Health is a first-in-class, comprehensive suite of patient advocacy services designed for patients and consumers who are determined to be empowered in their health care journey and are no longer willing to accept traditional barriers to their information.
Unblock Health Twitter: @UnblockHealth
Website: https://www.unblock.health/
Patient Impact Stories: https://www.unblock.health/patient-impact-stories/
Links and Resources
- Requesting Medical Records, Grace Cordovano, PhD, BCPA, and Shahid N. Shah, M.Sc. https://journal.ahima.org/page/requesting-medical-records
- Interview at HIMSS22 discussing Patient Administrative Burden & Unblock Health https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/video/assisting-patients-dealing-administrative-burden
- Grace’s last episode with us on what it means to be a patient advocate: Episode 114: Who’s Got the Patient’s Back? with Patient Advocate Grace Cordovano
You can also find this episode on your favorite podcast network such as:
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