The Moscow Department of Health has made changes to the order adopted on December 20, according to which mandatory audio recording of appointments was introduced in all public medical institutions of the capital, except dentistry, Kommersant noted.
The changes concern safety: in In the document, a provision appeared that “all anonymized records will be stored separately from the electronic medical record, in different storage facilities without reference to admission data, personal data of the patient and the doctor.” The new version of the order outlined the maximum storage period for audio — one month, and also clarified that medical organizations will be held responsible for leaks.
A clause was removed from the document that required monthly submission to the directorate for coordinating the activities of medical organizations of the work schedules of doctors whose appointments are recorded. The Department of Health noted that they updated the order, “having analyzed the opinions of experts, representatives of the medical and patient communities.”
Recording conversations between doctors and patients as part of a pilot project began in the fall of 2023 in two Moscow clinics. The experiment was considered successful and they decided to extend the “selective audio monitoring system” to all medical institutions from December 28 in order to improve the “quality and safety” of outpatient appointments.
According to the order, warnings about “anonymized recording” of conversations with doctors will appear in clinics, special equipment will be installed in offices, and medical workers will be sent to training in audio monitoring. “We receive complaints from patients about the formal, not always respectful attitude of doctors. Doctors often complain about disrespectful behavior on the part of patients. As a rule, both are right. To increase trust between doctors and patients, we need a new culture of communication,” said the Department of Health.
Meduza explained that a specially trained employee, selected by the chief physician, will selectively listen to audio recordings and evaluate how recommendations for communicating with patients are followed.
Among the parameters and criteria for assessing the quality of reception are “friendliness, politeness, correctness, participation”, “demonstration of superiority, aggression, threat, irritation, indifference, banter, ridicule towards the patient”, “criticism of the patient, the patient’s relatives, colleagues, management”, as well as “the use of complex professional terminology”, “negative words and monosyllabic sentences”.
According to the results of the pilot project, the results of which were provided to Kommersant by the Department of Health, most doctors were not convinced at the end of the appointment that the patient understood the prescriptions and recommendations; auditors often failed to “identify the patient’s examination.” Machine analytics of records of almost 46 thousand appointments “carried out with errors” showed that in 65% of cases doctors did not comply with communication ethics, the newspaper retells the results of the experiment.