Here's a question for HN people: what do you use to manage your medical records on Android?
I rarely go to the doctor so not much to keep track of, yet...
Health records need to be impartial and unbiased so future medical care can be given with the best possible information.
People should be able to have things they don't understand about their body clarified. There's fewer things scarier than not understanding why your body isn't reacting the way you'd expect.
- "they'll want things clarified they don't understand" This is, by far and overwhelmingly, the reason it is a good idea to expose patients (and their defacto caregivers, AKA, their families) to their medical records. When it comes to preventative medicine and chronic conditions people have far more control over their health than the doctor does and the better they understand their health, the better they are able to do something positive about it.
Failing to understand the purpose of the pills, he decided that if he just took all of them, his problem would go away.
Granted, adults (usually) have better judgment than a 10-year-old about things like that, but nonetheless patients almost inevitably are able to make better decisions when they understand why they're being asked to do things.
There's no benefit to reading the technical note, you'll just ask for the clarification... which the doctor already gave you. Or you're going to waste his time having him explain undergrad biology to you.
Think of it like this: Would you want your customers reading the comments you leave in your code? Probably not! They'll waste your time asking you about the comment you left saying "this could cause an error and bring the servers down". Or they completely misunderstand something and cancel the service. Or they'll complain that you left a swear word in. Etc. etc.
Sorry, but they're already neither. Medical records are also the same mechanism used to determine reimbursements, meaning the codes in them that represent diagnoses and treatments are subject to multiple incentive structures.
Just because a coder massages the specific codes in use doesn't mean the clinicians are altering care.
Honestly, there's a lot of new incentive structures on care givers and their institutions focused on so many things, like reducing readmissions (thereby reducing all forms of medical error in the process), or forming provider cohorts and using comprehensive comparison metrics between similar hospitals in similar areas and situations, to incentivize and reward those facilities which achieve the best care.
And, on the subject of the MR/EHR itself, of course most of it is unbiased! Do you think your lab results, prescriptions, vital signs, demographics are subject to bias? Your medical record isn't where a doctor leaves a long note about their opinion of you. It's where all that stuff above, and allergies, and outpatient care history, and inpatient history, and all kinds of factual unbiased things go.
E.g., I need a personal trainer to help me work around my back problems. It's useful to be able to answer his/her questions by referencing my records, instead of vague shrugging about some random disc.
Another e.g.: my aunt does a good job of sharing family medical records so that we know who in our past had conditions that may be relevant to our healthcare as well.
My grandparents did and 3 years later it still hasn’t come straight.
Kaiser still can't sort out my past records after I moved from SoCal to NorCal, and remained with Kaiser the whole time.
Having a copy of your medical record in a format that is easy to carry and, even more important, easy for your clinician to read will go a long way towards insuring your new doctor, etc. has enough information not to do you more harm.
Renders CDA documents.
Additionally for all the devs on here, we make those health system integrations available to your app via an API.