Keeping Records

John Moore on The Health Care Blog wonders if Google Health may be not long for this web.

Is it my fault for never updating my record there?

In theory I love the idea of having my health information in one convenient place, but as with so many things in life, what I like in theory, and what I get around to taking specific action to support or cause to be, are different things.

This is especially interesting to me since I just a few days ago attended a lecture by Dr. John Halamka, Chief Information Officer of both Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (so you know he thinks about health records!) that covered a lot of points about electronic health records. (My extensive notes are on the MLA '10 Blog.)

For a lot of reasons, it seems as if we really do want very much to have functional electronic health records that can keep up with a person's health history through life and over the course of multiple conditions, physicians, treatments and institutions--but we don't have it yet.

In my case, I think the problem is a laziness issue. I signed up for the account in Google, I know how to update the record in Google, I have a no worse than average understanding of my health and a probably higher than average interest in the subject, so I could keep the darn thing up to the minute.

I don't, because I just don't get around to signing in and making the updates every time I get a test result or whatever. I don't think I've updated it this year, even. It's not part of my personal health care process. Even though I love records! I want to know this stuff!

And if I, with my (I suspect) greater than average motivation to do this, don't get it done, it may be that updates will have to be automatic to get broad adoption of EHRs. To take one of Dr. Halamka's thoughts, about a 'health URL,' if I could give a link to someone at the front desk when I check in for an appointment, and have the details of my visit automatically sent to my EHR, then the updating would get done. You could give your health URL along with your insurance and/or billing information, and not worry about it, except probably to sign in once in a while to make sure everything looked right.

Easy! I'd happily do this tomorrow, if the system were in place and if I had a doctor's appointment on Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend.

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