“Are You a Girl or a Boy?”
Ever since my primary-care pediatric group practice adopted electronic records, we’ve used them to give our patients pre-visit online questionnaires that screen for various things: tuberculosis, lead exposure, developmental issues, autism, drug and alcohol use, postpartum depression, food insecurity and so on.
I started off thinking that the questionnaires were intended to save precious visit time by asking patients about these subjects before the appointment. Then I realized that our practice bills the health-insurance companies for administering these questionnaires (and some pay quite well). More recently, I’ve realized that these surveys offered another benefit as well—perhaps the most valuable of all.
For my young patient Remi’s three-year checkup, his parents completed all the recommended pre-visit online screenings.