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Personal Health Records: the Past Can Create a Healthy Future
Should you create a personal health record?
The Institute of Medicine estimates that paperwork and unnecessary administrative costs waste an estimated $190 billion of American's healthcare dollars every year.
"If banking were like health care," wrote the Institute in a recent report, "automated teller machine transactions would take not seconds but perhaps days or longer as a result of unavailable or misplaced records."
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 authorized incentives for doctors and hospitals to implement electronic records technology. An electronic health record is a digital version of a patient chart that can be quickly accessed and shared with a hospital, lab, pharmacy, or another doctor so your healthcare providers are reading from the same page.
It's a great idea in theory. But when patients are seeing five physicians at a time, it's unlikely that any doctor's record is going to have all the relevant facts. Using a primary care physician to coordinate your care might be an exception. Otherwise, the only person who knows everything is the patient.
If you're sick, injured, or unconscious, how will you recall and communicate important details about your health to your team? The answer is a personal health record.
Similar to the electronic records created by physicians, a personal health record is something you do on your own. It's easy to do and free with a service like Microsoft HealthVault.
HealthVault offers consumers a safe and secure online space create a personal health record, where you can organize and store details of your health history, conditions, appointments, medications, important documents, and emergency contact information. These details are vital to making sound decisions about your present and future health and well-being.
Most important, a HealthVault personal health record can be shared online with your healthcare providers so they have information to help them make the most appropriate recommendations for treatment and care.
Regardless of where you create it, your personal health record is yours and yours alone—it's protected by the privacy rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). You control what to share and whom to share it with.
Should you create a personal health record? The answer is yes. Consolidating and organizing your health information so it can be easily accessed and shared with healthcare providers will help ensure you receive the highest quality healthcare.
Click any of these links for more information about personal health records.
U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health