Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [42]
Clearly, only the individual is in a position to be at the hub of all his health information. Only you have the right to all your health e-memories. Indeed, you may log some aspect of your health that no one else has a need or right to see. You must take ownership of your health memories.
Seeing the need, software makers have already taken action. Quicken Health can track the state of all the financial transactions associated with health treatments. This is essential for billing and insurance information for the 88 percent of us who have some chronic health problem as we pass sixty, since every medical encounter generates many pieces of paper that we are likely to have to deal with.
Microsoft HealthVault is a free service that promises to warehouse and safeguard your personal medical information that can ultimately be shared with health providers. Google Health is another such utility. These services allow you to upload and manage your own health and wellness information and to authorize third parties to “blindly” upload data to your record, without being able to access the other information therein. The third party can be a person, such as your doctor, or an organization, like an insurance company, or a private clinic, or even a third-party software application. For example, you can have your weight and blood pressure stored to your HealthVault courtesy of software developed by the American Heart Association.
I think of HealthVault for health much in the same way as Quicken or Money for finances. My financial transactions come in different types, and so do my health records. Just as banks, credit cards, and brokers are combined under one database, records from each physician are aggregated into one database. Thus you become the keeper of all your records.
Someday, collecting all your health e-memories will be a snap; today it is a challenge. When I decided to pull together my medical information in 2001, my health records were strewn across four states. I collected my medical files from general-practitioner internists; heart, eye, and other specialists; dentists; several hospitals and clinics; and the half-dozen insurance companies that have covered me over the years. I ended up with more than a thousand pages.
None of the material was in digital form, even though much of it once lived on a computer. Some came by fax because that was deemed secure while e-mail wasn’t. Some was on large negative film, for example X-rays and MRIs. I scanned all the material into MyLifeBits. It included consultation records, doctor communications, surgical reports, immunization schedules and records, pharmacy orders, optical prescriptions, gum depth measurements, explanations of benefits, lab test results, receipts, electrocardiograms, pacemaker data, and echo stress tests. Several nuclear stress tests measuring heart blood flow on film and VHS tape had been discarded. Thus the only hard data about my heart over a long time period were lost. Luckily, a 1995 angiogram film of my heart’s vessel had been retained and was useful for the surgeon on the second bypass.
I had detailed physician statements about my heart, because my mother saved them, going back to a family physician’s letter observing a murmur when I was eight years old. I was immediately confined to my bed for that summer, followed by a visit to the Mayo Clinic.
In 1956, when I was in my early twenties, a cardiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital reevaluated my situation. His prognosis: Go live a normal life without competitive sports. All through the sixties and seventies my general practitioner assured me that a cholesterol level of 230 was normal. Maybe so, but “normal” turned out to mean “bad” for me when I had a cardiac arrest on February 27, 1983, in