Massachusetts Personal Injury Library
Families can track medical records
Massachusetts attorney Thomas M. Kiley concentrates on legal issues regarding children’s health. A recent article by Associated Press said the Mayo Clinic has partnered with Microsoft Corporation technology to launch a new free website that will help families track their personal and medical health information in electronic form.
The Mayo Clinic Health Manager is one of the new services for personal health records. The sites, from companies such as Microsoft and Google Inc. and major health insurers, give people an way to store medical information and then be able to transfer it to a new clinic, hospital or doctor’s office. Doctor’s offices, however, are not all digitally prepared to do this, so this kind of a program gives the tools to individuals and families to manage their health records themselves.
The Mayo Clinic Health Manager uses Microsoft’s HealthVault system to store medical histories, test results, immunization files and other records from doctors’ offices and hospital visits, along with data from home devices like heart rate monitors.
Anyone can set up an account, not just Mayo Clinic patients. Once you have an account, you can give access to that information to other family members or other doctors. To set up an account, you will begin giving your family medical history and talk about current and past health problems, allergies, medical conditions, and medications you are taking. You also enter age, gender, and other basic information into the database. You can enter all of your doctors, dentists, specialists, insurance companies, and which pharmacies you want to use. Based on this information in the database, the site will remind you of particular issues such as scheduling a yearly mammogram, or finding additional information or articles about your medical conditions.
These kinds of prompts and reminders will especially help patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure by reminding them of actions they need to take to stay on top of their condition. The reminders are sent to the site and users have to log into the site regularly to find these reminders, because e-mail reminders are not allowed for privacy reasons.
The federal stimulus package approved recently includes incentives for doctors and hospitals to transfer their paper files into electronic health records. Because of the quantity of records they’re dealing with, most doctors and hospitals have been slow about adopting these procedures.
Since it will be awhile before doctors and hospitals are able to implement these changes, it is up to patients themselves to utilize tools like Microsoft’s HealthVault system to enter their medical information themselves and keep track of changes in medications, immunizations, and other updates. Hopefully, one day these electronic records will connect patients, doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies to share this important information.
Some critics of this plan advise patients to urge a change in the national laws so that the privacy of patients are covered and health care systems will not share information without the patient’s consent.
For more information, go to http://www.mayoclinic.com.
