Gyn Clinic, Continuity Clinic, and Urgent Care

County Gyn Clinic. If I liked gynecology, I would have gone into it. I didn't go into it. This is the county clinic, so you can basically expect it to be an STD-screen-for-all and PAP-fiesta. One young woman said the best place to get a copy of her prior PAP records was a state prison. Enough said. What I will say is that I genuinely like the patient population; the people I saw were surprisingly grateful and patient.

In my continuity clinic I saw one young lady who wanted her electronic medical record to be blocked from access by medical students. When I asked why, she revealed she had dated a medical student, and did not want him having access to her chart. I explained that although there is no way to block access to her record, all movements in the medical record are tracked. Keystrokes are tracked. The amount of time spent looking at any given page, report, or image is recorded. So if her electronic chart was accessed inappropriately, there would be a record of it, and the record can always be audited. There are also pretty significant repercussions, professionally and legally, for inappropriately accessing medical records. But she did bring up an interesting point; now our health information is becoming digitalized, it is more accessible than ever before...

And lastly, in clinic I had a patient try to tell me he got gonorrhea from a cat. He had already been told that he had gonorrhea... but apparently not what gonorrhea is (it's an STD). He immediately launched into a story about how all his symptoms began when his housemate got a cat, which pranced around the house, just touching everything... I asked him if he was aware that gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease. Long pause. OHHH.

Let's wrap it up. What am I trying to say here? If you've been wronged by a cat or a med student, the door to my clinic is always open. You might want to wash your hand after you touch that door handle though...