Clicky’s Corner is where Clicky, Zuper Micro Man’s sidekick, explains the exciting world of medical records paperwork to our youngest readers. Clicky is a computer mouse. He believes he is a bird. Please do not tell him.
Hi kids! Clicky here. Tweet tweet. (That is a bird noise. I am a bird.)
Every time you visit the doctor, somebody writes down what happened. How tall you are. Whether you said “ahh.” Which arm got the shot, and whether you were brave about it. All those notes go into a folder called your medical record, and it follows you around for the rest of your life, a little like a very quiet puppy that is made of paper.
You might ask, “Why does the doctor need to remember that I said ahh in 2019?” Great question! The answer is that nobody knows which note will matter later. The one time nobody wrote down that you are allergic to strawberries is the one time somebody brings strawberries. So we write down everything, just in case. That is why a medical record for a ten-year-old can be eighty pages long, and why grown-up records are long enough to stop a door.
Who is allowed to read your record? You, your parents, your doctors, and people you give permission to. That permission is a form called an authorization. It has a lot of boxes. Every box is important. I know because I have clicked on all of them.
Activity: Ask a grown-up how many pages long their medical record is. They will not know. Nobody knows. That is why Zupermicro exists.
Clicky’s fun fact: The word “chart” comes from the Latin charta, which means paper. It does not mean bird. I checked twice.