Oregon Cardiology’s poor record keeping and lousy office management

Here is a letter that I sent to the Office Manager of Oregon Cardiology, located at Peace Health Sacred Heart Medical Center, by fax on 12-10-19.

Re: “Urgent” Medical Record Request, Failure to send follow-up records, and more

I am writing to yo to express my disappointment with your office due to the following reasons:

1. On 12-9-19 my office received a fax request for records labelled “URGENT” for a mutual patient. Her scheduled appointment with your office was for 12-10-19; less than 24-hours’ notice! Do you really schedule appointments at the last minute? Do you wait to request records at the last minute too? A similar event occurred in February when your office requested records on this patient for a New Patient evaluation but gave us less than 1-weeks’ notice! Is that also standard practice for your office?
2. I faxed my response back to your office on 12-9-19 at 4:30pm when I found it upon coming into my office that is closed on Mondays. I specifically requested that you call my office in the morning when we opened at 9:30am, yet no one called. Do you commonly fail to follow-up on such specific requests from other physicians expressing these type of concerns?
3. Your office requested records for the patients’s 8-19-19 visit with “name of her” PA on 8-8-19, to which we responded on 8-12-19. To date we have yet to receive her follow-up visit record from your office. So you expect us to respond to your requests quickly, but you can’t be bothered to forward your own follow-up visits to their primary care doctor even more than 90 days later?!

Obviously since no one called, the records were NOT “urgently” needed; you were able to complete the patient visit without them.

I seriously doubt that anyone at your office will respond to my five questions in writing as I would like to see done, so recognize that I will be posting about these incidents on my web blog and specifically citing your clinic if I don’t receive a written response by close of business this Friday, 12-13-19. If I can take the time to complain in writing, you can respond in writing too.

Signed off, Dr. Darryl George

Guess what? Someone did call on Tuesday, 12-17-19, but failed to leave a message when we didn’t answer. But no response since then and definitely no letter as requested.

So here’s my blog entry as promised.