Personal Health Records for your emergencies.

When emergency strikes,you have very little time to react to it.You could be involved in numerous such situations in your everyday life.It could be man-made as in accidents or natural disaster like Katrina hurricane in Florida or Forest fires in California.When you are involved in such an emergency situation it is important to carry your personal health record with you.It not only provides complete identification  information about you but also vital health information.In case you are not able to communicate with health care providers,these could act as a source of important information about your life and medical conditions.

What are the different parts of Health record?

There are seven key elements that are needed for a basic health information record about you these include:

• DEMOGRAPHICS
• LIST OF MEDICATIONS
• DRUG ALLERGIES
• DIAGNOSIS / PROBLEM LIST
• HISTORY OF TESTS AND PROCEDURES
• RECORD OF IMMUNIZATIONS
• PERTINENT FAMILY MEDICAL HISTORY

Demographic information relate to your Name,age and contact address.This also includes information about your insurance and employer.You should also include contact information of your immediate relative or neighbor in case you are involved in a serious health emergency situation.

List of medication includes your current medication dosage and also your past medication history if any.

Allergies include any adverse reactions to Drugs or environment or food.

Diagnosis list includes any previous medical or surgical conditions for which you have had undergone any treatment.These could also include minor or major procedures.

As the name suggests History or tests and procedures include any diagnostic investigation that you may have undertaken in the recent past.

List of immunization includes childhood as well as adult immunization taken.

Pertinent family medical history is essential if there has been any major family illness which affected your immediate family members.

All these information can be carried in any handy format either in paper based or USB memory drive.Digital records have an advantage in that multiple copies could be created form them and also update of information is easy.You could also password protect these information so that only you could see them.But,the emergency information should be easily accessible to health care providers.Only your detailed medical history should be made accessible by you alone.

Although these sounds easy in theory,yet to to put them into practice is very difficult.So,that’s the reason one should choose an commercially available health software,which enables you to easily enter your health information and also update them and gives you control over your health information data.

The main caveat with USB based medical information storage is that they could be lost or damaged and you could lose all your stored health information.

The other option is to use an on-line method for storage of health related information.Today there are many vendors which offer free to paid information storage.These have significant benefits than the USB drive based systems due to the fact that they are available anytime,anywhere and always.You need to have access to Internet in order to access the information.However,privacy and security of your health data is of paramount importance when you are choosing these online providers.

Microsoft Health Vault-Raising Questions

Microsoft launched its Consumer health service called Health Vault-to signify Security on October 04 2007.Following the launch and also massive marketing,blogosphere and media were filled and continue with analysis and comments on Personal Health Record.Up until then,there were only a couple of articles in the blogosphere dedicated to Personal Health Record topic.Now not only there are plethora of articles but also polls which show that people are really interested in Personal Health Record products.

Have we reached the tipping point?

This is a very difficult question to analyze,as still many consumers are not aware of the term Personal Health Record.There is no consensus definition about the term.There are well more than 200 vendors in the marketplace trying to sell Personal health record products.
Various organizations have now started working on developing a working definition for Personal health record.Even the HL-7 organization which focused on Electronic Health Record is moving on working definition of Personal health record.But,when will all these definitions see the light of day?Again a difficult question to answer.

Will personal health records really benefit physicians and also hospitals.Again that is a very difficult question.If personal health records are really personal,then they need to be populated by Individuals,questions arise about their authenticity.If there is a extensive personal health data,then the physician will have to wade through all these data before coming onto a working diagnosis of any patient,this adds to confusion and also could create avenues for potential litigations in future.So,will physicians adopt PHRs widely?

What if patients like to store their Personal health records in their own format?May be a USB key or just a plain paper based format?Will Physicians and hospitals accept them?
What if the patients donot have their health records on Microsoft Health Vault but would prefer Google Health-(due to arrive in early 2008)?

These Questions will definitely need to be answered before we embark on the road to get Personal health records for all.