I liked the fact that as a result of the shortened consultation time, the waiting time for patients was also greatly reduced.
Margaret Child Clinic
Margaret Child Clinic is a pediatric clinic located in Hatsudai, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo.
We interviewed Dr. Tanaka, the director of the clinic, about the background of the introduction of the Melp web-based medical interview system and how it is uniquely used.
- What made you decide to introduce Melp?
I was originally acquainted with Dr. Kusumi, the director of the Navitus Clinic, and I learned that they were introducing Melp at the Navitus Clinic.
Navitas Clinic has been actively introducing IT, and many of the systems used at Navitas were good systems, so I was interested in Melp.
- Before that, had you ever considered introducing web-based medical questionnaires?
Yes. Actually, I was thinking of introducing web-based medical interviewing before I opened my clinic, and I received a demo from one company at that time.
However, the initial cost was very high at over one million yen, and the questionnaire of that company was an in-office tablet questionnaire. However, the person in charge told me, "There are some clinics where the iPad is taken by the patient as it is, and some clinics manage it by attaching a string to it.
I only asked that one company about web-based medical questionnaires, but I thought that web-based medical questionnaires were expensive, so I didn't look for web-based medical questionnaires much after that.
- How did you feel after taking the demo of Melp?
Because the price is low, we felt that we could implement it. We also liked the fact that we could change the web questionnaire by ourselves at any time.
- When you actually started using Melp, how did you find it easy to use?
I think the good thing is that as a result of the shortened consultation time, the waiting time for patients has been greatly reduced.
In the past, after a patient's consultation was over, we would sometimes have to transcribe the details of the consultation into the patient's chart before calling the next patient. When that time piles up, the waiting time for patients inevitably becomes longer, but that time has been greatly reduced.
- Thank you very much. Please let us know if there are any areas for improvement.
To be honest, I felt that the response to the web interview from patients was not very good. However, there are some information that really needs to be filled in, such as medical history and allergies, so I'm sorry to say that we ask patients to fill in all the information in the web questionnaire.
Also, there is no function to temporarily save the answers to the questionnaire in Melp, so I think it would be good if we could pause and temporarily save the answers to long questionnaires, such as asking about the child's growth history in the developmental outpatient clinic.
- I see. We will share this with the development team. Your hospital also uses our OCR service, can you tell us why you introduced this service?
At our hospital, we ask patients to fill out a separate questionnaire form for outpatient development, but we wanted to send the resulting questionnaire screen to the electronic medical record.
We work with the NPO Florence, and when we consulted with the person in charge at Florence, she saw the Melp website and said that we could use the OCR function.
We were able to try out the OCR function free of charge, so we used OCR to recognize the text of the medical questionnaire on the results screen of the computer and sent it to the electronic medical record. The text recognition was accurate and we were able to import it into the electronic medical record, so we decided to introduce it.
I liked the fact that the OCR could read not only paper medical questionnaires but also computer screen images as they were.
Thank you very much. Do you have anythint else to tell us?
It is a good service and I hope it will spread to other clinics.