Share your Vitals like you Share your Photos

4 22, 2021

We love seeing pictures of your furbabies and grandbabies. We would also love to see your blood pressure and blood sugar readings. Please upload them to your portal!

Let’s leverage technology like the Patient Portal to better communicate with your physician.

In 2014, Medicare required all participating physicians to use Electronic health records to maintain reimbursement levels. Soon after, Patient Portals became available to patients so they can access their clinical data online, through a secure and encrypted connection. Dr. Taylor started using online medical records systems in 2000 and has offered patient portal access since 2015.

Use of the Patient portal is meant for situations that are not urgent, and in most cases, don’t need a scheduled time to discuss or require more than 10 minutes to attend to. There are multiple benefits of using the Patient Portal:

• **You can share additional details and information as they come up, after the office visit.
• **You can ask questions between visits.
• **You can communicate when you tend to remember-evening or weekends.
• **Messages are secure.
• **It cuts down on phone tag.
• **It allows logging and tracking of messages and reports.
• **Your physician can provide more detailed answers or new resources that were not available at the time of visit.

Here’s one scenario where use of the Patient Portal enhances patient care:

• At your last visit, your A1C diabetes test was at goal since you kept up with your walking and better food choices and thus lost weight. You make a plan to cut down on your medication and schedule a follow-up office visit for 3 months to recheck your labs.
• But monitoring of your diabetes does not end with the office visit. It's especially important now to have more, not less, frequent contact with your physician. This does not necessarily mean frequent office visits. Sharing your blood sugar readings that you check once or twice daily can be uploaded to your patient portal two or three times a week. If there is anything of concern, you or your physician can reach out by phone.

So-If you can upload photos to social media, you can upload your blood sugar and blood pressure readings to share with us.  

Here’s how our patients can do it:

>>Put a short-cut of the Patient Portal log-in page on your phone, laptop, or computer. The Patient Portal will work on any browser (Chrome/ Firefox/ Safari/ Android/ iOS.)

>>Once logged in, go to My Vitals and enter your reading, date of reading, and any comments.

Dr. Taylor can then track them along with you and adjust meds or follow-ups as necessary.

Check out other user-friendly features the Patient Portal offers.

At Foundation Primary Care, we provide simple, convenient, and cost-effective direct primary care to our patients. As patients of our direct primary care clinic, you have direct access to Dr. Taylor and can get an appointment within 48 (usually 24) business hours.

And best of all, there’s no extra charge (copay, deductible, etc.) for each review of your data or for any consult!

Remember then: Next time you share some pictures, see if you need to share some numbers with your doc too.