It is just a regular scene in my clinic when I ask a patient about the medical records he/she possesses about the past surgical procedures he underwent or some other significant illness, the patient responds innocently that it has been many years since that happened and the documents are now misplaced or not available. In this case, if only that patient had a unique ID and all the records were in an online database such incidents will be mentioned only in the history text books. So I was searching for such online databases which can be accessed for free and came up with the following links.
Interactive Personal Health Record - iHealthRecord – This service has been there for quite some time and offers a great service for free. But Microsoft has started it’s new service in consumer health care market by offering free personal health records on the Web which is called HealthVault. Similar to iHealthrecord, the personal information will be stored in a secure, encrypted database. Its privacy controls, the company said, are set entirely by the individual, including what information goes in and who gets to see it. But unlike ihealthrecord, Healthvault does not expect most individuals to type in much of their own health information into the Web-based record. Instead, individuals will give doctors, clinics and hospitals permission to directly send into their HealthVault record information like blood pressure, cholesterol, medicines prescribed etc. I believe that it could be only a matter of time when Google comes up with a similar service.
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