Personal Health Monitor II - A Health Care Crisis

The idea of patients keeping paper copies of their personal health information to facilitate access to health care services is not new.

What is new is the growing need for family members and individuals to assume responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of health care information amid the chaos of mostly paper-based medical records.

Consider:

Under the current paper-based system, patients and their doctors lack instant, constant access to medical information. As a result, when a patient sees more than one doctor, no doctor knows exactly what another doctor is doing, or even that another doctor is involved. The consequences range from inconvenient or even fatal. Each time an individual encounters a new healthcare provider, the patient must recall his or her medical history. Not only is this redundant, it can introduce error and imprecision, ensuring that no two copies of a personal medical record will be exactly alike. In an emergency, delay and lack of information can be deadly (emphasis added).

The above quotation is from a very credible source:
Health IT in Government – Transforming Healthcare and Empowering Citizens. Marc Wine and John Clark of the GSA Office of Intergovernmental Solutions. //colab.cim3.net/file/work/IAB/HIT%20in%20Govt%20Report%203.06.pdf

Putting patients’ information directly into their own hands is being advocated by an increasingly large chorus of reformers, advocates, and clinicians themselves. One of the driving forces is the need to enable patients to put often-missing information into the hands of their clinicians at the point of care. (e.g., what medications they are actually taking).

Personal Health Monitors (PHMs) can and should play an important role in helping bridge an information gap that exists too often today between people and the health professionals who serve them.

The Figure shows a traditional form known as a MAR – Medication Administration Record. Note that the form is spread across multiple pages, can be difficult to read, is full of medical jargon, and does not contain all information that might be needed during either an emergency or a routine visit to a health care provider.

In short, the MAR (an example taken from “real life”) is a mistake waiting to happen. The problem with the MAR is not that it is "on paper". The problem is that is very difficult to understand... for anybody. Simply converting the MAR to an electronic image would just compound the problem. So the issue is really not "electronic records" vs "manual/hand-written records" -- it's about communication, and, increasingly, about health service organizations that tolerate info-garbage.