When an elderly parent or grandparent learns that his or her physician is retiring, it can be a stressful time. Perhaps he or she has gone to that doctors for years—decades, even—and the thought of transitioning to another physician can be overwhelming.

The Emotional Toll

Your parent or grandparent probably won’t verbalize it, but he or she is likely feeling extremely anxious about transferring to another physician’s care. Doctors and patients build up an incredibly strong foundation of trust over years of conversations about medical and psychological conditions.

It can be hard to place that same level of trust in someone else, especially someone who will be making medical decisions for your care. Those kinds of relationships can’t be forced, but with goodwill, patience, and excellent listening skills, budding trust among a patient and a new doctor will very likely develop.

Practical Considerations

There are important practical steps that need to be taken when moving to another physician’s care. If you’re the legal representative of your parent or grandparent, you can sign up right here at My Retired Doctor to have the patient’s entire medical record retrieved before the retiring physician closes his or her medical practice.

We’ll collect the full patient medical record from all doctors, specialists, hospitals, and nursing care facilities that the patient has been to in the past few years (the amount of years varies based on the regulations for patient record retention in the particular state(s) the records are requested from).

We’ll consolidate the records, check them for optimal accuracy and completion, and then scan the records to send out either a secure electronic file or paper file. We can send the file directly to the new physician’s office, to your or to the patient’s home, or wherever the medical record needs to go.

A Piece of Advice

We at My Retired Doctor have helped countless doctors take care of all the details of their patient records before retiring, as well as countless patients who are preparing to transfer their medical care to a new physician.

That puts us in the perfect position to offer a word of advice:

Give it time.

It can be tempting to do some research, find a new physician that meets all of your and the patient’s criteria, go to one or two appointments, and then the patient feels the urge to jump over to another doctor’s care.

The thing is:

It might be a bit awkward at first.

That’s perfectly normal—remember, the patient and doctor are strangers! It can take a few months, maybe even a year, to start feeling comfortable, to get used to each other’s communication style, and to build up some rapport. So give it some time, and perhaps the patient will end up just as satisfied with his or her care as they were with their now-retired physician.

Good luck from My Retired Doctor!

Please reach out to us if we can be of any assistance with the patient’s medical records by calling 877-328-2343 or emailing info@datafied.com.