New Person, Same Old Medicine

Hello internet users!

Feeling good? Yes? That's good. I am glad to hear it. It always makes me feel warm inside when I know that each and every one of my dedicated viewers is having a good time. If at any point in your life you are not having a good time, I want you to know that you can come to me and we can talk it out. I feel like we have gotten to know each other pretty well.

Anyways enough about you, let's talk about what you really want to read about: me. After the tragic loss of Carol last week, I had to look to new horizons to finish off my senior project in these final three weeks. My mom is friends with Dr. Lalani and she asked if there was something else I could do in his office. He gave me the number of a physician's assistant named Heather. I left Heather a voice mail pleading for some sort of structure in this chaotic spiral I was slowly descending into. She texted me and informed me of a new possible on-site mentor. Her name is Sarah and she is the professional and spiritual successor to Carol.

I may not have the same, witty rapport with Sarah that I had established with Carol, but her position in Dr. Lalani's office is essentially the same as Carol's was which means that I do relatively the same kind of tasks that I have become accustomed to. The only problem with coming into the office now is that all the work on the PGX study that needed to be done in the office was completed by me during my first four weeks of my project. So Sarah and Heather had to find new tasks for me to do. However, even though what I did this week in the office was not related to the PGX study, I still developed valuable skills in learning how to look at patients charts electronically and help Heather with tasks that make her life easier.

To explain what I did this week, first you have to understand that when a doctor visits a patient many of the important notes that they take are hand-written and then later scanned into the patients electronic charts to be kept on file. Now when these patients come back for a follow-up visit with Heather, the problem is that many times Heather does not have these hand-written notes (labelled as "progress notes") on hand. So, it was my job this week to take all the patients that she will see in the next few weeks and print out their progress notes and then attach these progress notes to their physical, paper charts, which Heather actually has. This way Heather has all of the information that she needs before she meets with her patients. If I didn't do this, then either Sarah or Heather would need to do it themselves and they don't got time for that. They have more important stuff to do. Or at least I would hope that they do. Also, I learned that insurance companies like to know what kind of tests have been performed on the patients, so in addition to the progress notes, I also had to print out a series of results of tests that were done on Heather's diabetes patients to then fax to the insurance companies.

All in all, it felt good to be back in an office, feel productive, and feel like I was actually helping someone with something, hopefully making their life easier. I printed out sooooo many progress notes. Lemme tell you, Heather is stacked with progress notes. She has all of the progress notes she could ever need. Well I hope you had a good time reading this. Catch ya next week!