Continuity of Care: Records In One Place

Our parents often end up have surgery in one place as we have them meet specialists in Mumbai, Delhi or whichever city we are staying in and as they return to their town for follow-up treatment not having access to all one’s records causes the difficulty of having to remember all the details and from the stress of unnecessary or repeated tests.”

Going through an article which saw Burrington-Brown realise  the importance of a comprehensive personal health record up close when her mother, who lives half the year in Idaho and half in Arizona, developed a serious illness, makes one realise the importance of having an online Personal Health Record.

It is our attempt to also help seniors and caregivers responsible for seniors to create ans use our PHR to maintain a personal health record.

What is a good PHR? And does it make you healthier

The quality and scope of PHR programs varies widely, and a good one should serve as more than a static repository which just saves you from filling detailed questionnaires every time you visit a new doctor by printing your life’s medical history.

The bigger question is can using PHRs actually make you healthier?

A good PHR for someone with diabetes would list the blood glucose level in a PHR automatically create a graph and if that shows a pattern of spikes that a one-time check in the doctor’s office never would catch, prompting a call for help. The program should allow for e-mails for prescription refills, automatic downloads of lab-test results, and finally where possible even glucometers that plug into the computer to directly record measurements.

Hence just having a PHR isn’t automatically better than a family keeping good paper records. So we need to look at the services on offer before we choose which program to go with.

If we manage to do this it will have to come with the realization that we are the people driving our health care.