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Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

Privacy concerns aside, I don't really understand what the point of this is, to be honest. You can already add family/caregivers as authorized users on a MyChart (Epic) profile, which is an actual source of truth, not a separate data store that you need to update manually.

This seems like a good experiment in building a CRUD app, but I'd recommend doing that with something with less liability.

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I use MyChart. It's a great way for your doctor and clinic to communicate with you.

It's not a place where I'm going to store contact information for all my doctors, or appointments for doctors that aren't at that clinic, or all my prescriptions and all the pharmacies.

When your daughter is reacting badly to her new chemotherapy, and running fevers and throwing up, and somebody needs to call her palliative care specialist and it needs to be you, not her, then where will you find the specialist's phone number?

I hope you'll never be there, but if you are, I think you'll understand.

Does that work if you have multiple caregivers? Even seeing a doctor, and then getting a scan can involve multiple entities.

Other providers in the same clinic can be on the same MyChart. Different clinics might have different MyCharts. Some clinics don't user MyChart, or have a different app. And as you said, you may have many providers, and they are not all on the same MyChart.

> I don't really understand what the point of this is, to be honest [...] on a MyChart (Epic) profile

As someone who never heard of either MyChart nor Epic, I'm guessing it could be useful for people like me who don't have those things.

I could understand epic since I think that's mainly for doctors but don't most hospital systems use MyChart or similar portals nowadays to let patients access access their appointments/payment/lab results/doctor notes/etc

MyChart is Epic’s patient frontend.

What's Epic?

Epic is a electronic health record (EHR) software used by many hospitals and clinics. It's not the only EHR there are many but it's probably the most known. Doctors usually type patient notes, diagnoses, prescriptions... everything goes in Epic and your team of providers can gain access to see that info.

The software that runs on the backend of most healthcare facilities in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems

Not really. MyChart (which is provided by Epic) is a way for doctors and clinics to communicate with patients. Although you could give you doctor access to your information on Kate's App, that's not the purpose, and they probably don't want it.

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