For your Upcoming Surgery

When your surgery has been confirmed by the Operating Room scheduling team, we will email you a packet of preoperative and postoperative instructions and the date/time of your postoperative visit. Please make sure your email address on file in your portal account is up to date, and give the office a call if you do not receive the information or have any questions at any time.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR INOVA LOUDOUN PATIENTS

The electronic records system at Inova facilities is the Epic system. It is NOT the system used by Loudoun Medical Group practices in their offices, so the LMG portal function is separate from the Epic portal. The Epic portal is called My Chart.

THERE ARE 2 PROBLEMS THAT ARISE FROM THE USE OF MY CHART, IF YOU ARE SIGNED UP FOR IT:

1- If you are having surgery at Loudoun  Hospital and are having a sentinel node biopsy, you may get a notification from My Chart that you have an appointment in Nuclear Medicine on the date of your surgery and that you are to report there at a certain time. THIS IS NOT A TRUE APPOINTMENT  and you need to IGNORE THIS NOTIFICATION. Please report to Preop at the time you are given by the PreSurgical Services staff (usually 2 hours before your surgery start time). IGNORE THIS FALSE NUCLEAR MEDICINE APPOINTMENT. (This is also in the preop instructions we will send you.)

2- This is also a potential big problem: Once the pathologist signs the pathology report from your surgery, you will get a My Chart notification that there is a new result in your chart.  Loudoun Medical Group offices DO NOT use Epic as their office medical records system, and do not get such a notification. We get pathology reports faxed to us, often later in the day or overnight after they are signed out. This has casued some significant problems between patients who think we have seen these reports, and the physisicans who may not have yet seen these reports. This is an even worse problem for surgeons who might be in surgery when the results are faxed to the office.

I had the unfortunate experience recently of sitting next to a surgeon in the Recovery Room when we were both between surgical cases, doing what we needed to do to discharge our patients, when the other surgeon was receiving a tongue lashing on the phone because a patient had gotten My Chart pathology results a few hours before, and was wondering why the surgeon was so uncaring as to not call and give the results in what the patient was a timely manner (it was 2 hours or so). 

It is certainly your right to look at your pathology result whenever you wish, but please be advised that as a surgeon I am often in surgery and not in the office every day to read new faxes.  One of the reasons for a postop appointment is to dedicate time to you alone, to review your pathology report in detail. That is the time I will review your results with you, not if you call during the day, as the day is full of face to face commitments to other patients, and not if you call after hours because you have questions about the report you have read prior to your postop visit. After hours calls are for urgent medical concerns, not for elective discussion of pathology reports.  I am well aware that further treatment decisions often rest on these reports, and there is a lot of anxiety associated with the results, but my almost 4 decades of experience as a physician have taught me that the most effective way to review surgery results is in person, face to face, with time dedicated to only one patient. Thank you for your understanding.