Whether you use Me2MD or not, we want you to be better prepared when you embark for surgical treatment.

A specialist or hospital provides an opinion on treatment required and an estimate of costs on the basis of information you provide. We find that many people struggle with understanding what should be communicated initially. This is our attempt to fix that. Here is a checklist of things you may need to provide when seeking an opinion and cost estimate for a surgical procedure.

Contents

1. Why is this important?
2. How do I organize my medical data?
3. What information is required for a cost estimate?

Why is this important?

At Me2MD, we help a lot of people access surgical treatment. The first step toward this is to finalize the hospital and specialist for the treatment. We communicate your needs, both clinical and non-clinical, to selected hospitals, so that they can provide opinions on the best treatment for you and the costs for the same. Once you get this information from 3-4 hospitals, you can select the hospital for the treatment. Naturally, our first order of business is to build an accurate picture of your health. We provide you a secure link using which the data can be safely uploaded.

What do we do with your data: We prepare an electronic file for hospitals to review. This also helps our clinical operations team anticipate your needs better and prepare additional items. With experience, we have gotten better, and this is reflected in our case closures rates and patient satisfaction scores.

How do I organize my medical data?

Health and medical data is usually available in two formats

Soft Copy (electronic)

As far as possible, request and retain soft copy data from your local specialists and hospitals. Diagnostic data such as Angiography procedures or CT Angiographies are usually provided as a CD/DVD to a patient. You can request them to transfer it onto a USB drive and keep it safe.

What if I don’t have a CD/DVD drive: We can arrange for the CD/DVD to be shipped to us and returned to you after we have verified and copied it.

Hard Copy (paper)

You can either scan these or take clear pictures using your phone. Pictures or PDF should be organized page wise and named in date order along with their description, for easy reference e.g. - 20210722_2D-EchoReport.jpg

Pro tip: For taking pictures of documents, use apps like Office Lens, available on iOS and Android. If the photo is clear, the final output is extremely close to a scanned document.

So what information is required for a cost estimate?

Required Information (atleast one of them is a must have)

☑️ Reports of medical and disgnostic tests. For e.g., for cardiac patients, this would be reports of angiography tests, ECG, TMT and 3-D echo tests.

☑️ Lab tests results. This includes pathology and other similar tests (lipid profiles, sugar, and other tests): Details such as date, readings, reference ranges, etc. are required.

☑️ Discharge Summaries: Details such as Diagnosis, Chief Complaints, Final Diagnosis, Treatment, Procedures.

☑️ Medications: Clear pictures of the medication package along with dosage information (helps if you write it on a piece of paper, date it, and include it in the picture).

Optional Information (these are good to have)

☑️ Vital statistics such as weight and height.

☑️ Personal and family medical history, especially with regards to diabetes and hypertension.

☑️ Patient History: History of past ailments, procedures done and discharge summaries after hospital stays.