GlobalPatientRecord

Most people are aware of their own family medical history and are familiar with their parents’ recent ailments. A family medical history might provide a needed incentive to make better lifestyle choices and precautions. Your family history is probably the best predictor of risk for your own health.
If every individual in a family maintains electronic  medical  records, they will be well aware about the running diseases within the family. This aids you in having better control over your health by notifying your physicians of the conditions that run in the family.
To maintain your PHR you can simply place it in a file folder or subscribe to a Web-based service which allows you to access and enter online medical information. Your doctor may use this information and offer a Web portal or patient gateway that allows you to view and track some of your health information online. This way, you can stay in touch with your doctor thanks to up-to-date medical records and even get your prescription refills online.
A wide range of products are available to help you create an update your PHR, for example breast cancer monitoring software for caregivers and support for AIDS patients… as well as other targeted healthcare programs.

Your medical information is scattered across many different providers and facilities. For better healthcare you should keep track of complete, updated and easily accessible personal health records. These records can help health providers to treat you better and have a better control over your health.
PHRs can include information about your health, especially information that your doctor may not have, such as exercise routines, allergies, hereditary illnesses in your family or changes in your dietary habits. Therefore PHR can actually help you to be treated in a better way with the help of past records.
To help your doctor treat you well you should ensure that information in your PHR should be accurate and reliable. You should have control over how your health information is accessed, used, and disclosed. Doctors review patient information in order to monitor and improve quality of care you receive. Doctors can also suggest tips on how you can stay healthier after completely analyzing your medical history.
Global patient record can easily provide these records to your healthcare providers. Visit http://www.globalpatientrecord.com for more information about Personal Health Records.

PHRs encompass a wide variety of applications that enable people to collect, view, manage and share copies of their heath information or transactions electronically.
By putting consumers at the center of a network of healthcare  providers  and personalized service programs, PHRs could send timely reminders to people to get immunized or adhere to self-management guidelines for medication, diet, and exercise. This updates release their stress and make consumers carefree and help improve health.
PHR  monitors a consumer’s eating and exercising habits with which they can make changes to their lifestyle to more healthier routines. The information added in PHR can be tracked and some insight or capabilities can be added such as decision support, online medical chart or graphical displays to the raw data which ensures that the consumer receives alerts for treatments and healthcare control
A PHR also helps to make frequent interactions with the health care system less of a hassle as less time would be spend filling out forms and trying to remember medication doses and appointment dates.

A chronic illness isn’t the name of just one illness. It’s a word used to describe a group of health conditions that last a long time. In fact, the root word of chronic is “chronos,” which refers to time.

There are many kinds of chronic illnesses. Some illnesses (like a cold or the chicken pox) only last a short time and go away on their own, but sometimes an illness doesn’t go away. Don’t worry, most chronic illnesses are not contagious – you usually don’t catch them from someone else. But chronic illnesses can be genetic, meaning that parents can pass the tendency to get them on to their children before they are born through genes. If a person has a chronic illness, he needs to take care of his condition for months or years.

A PHR can help adolescents with chronic illnesses to communicate with their providers and others about their health. Personal health applications are designed to help people understand and track their treatments. For people with chronic diseases, their application helps in interpreting a range of relevant health data, illustrates online how their daily behaviors affect their condition and how they feel. It also provides specific recommendations for improving their typical routines.

You can keep track of medications, dosage, refills and routines via a Personal Health Record. Through an interactive Web portal, patients input personalized information on their daily activity level and lifestyle. They then receive customized plans to increase activity levels in ways that are tailored to their daily routines.

Capturing observations from the home and interacting with patients in everyday life helps put patients on their own healthcare monitoring, which is why PHR’s are the key to managing a healthier lifestyle.

COPENHAGEN — Jens Danstrup, a 77-year-old retired architect, used to bike all around town. But years of smoking have weakened his lungs, and these days he finds it difficult to walk down his front steps and hail a taxi for a doctor’s appointment.

Now, however, he can go to the doctor without leaving home, using some simple medical devices and a notebook computer with a Web camera. He takes his own weekly medical readings, which are sent to his doctor via a Bluetooth connection and automatically logged into an electronic record.

“You see how easy it is for me?” Mr. Danstrup said, sitting at his desk while video chatting with his nurse at Frederiksberg University Hospital, a mile away. “Instead of wasting the day at the hospital?”

He clipped an electronic pulse reader to his finger. It logged his reading and sent it to his doctor. Mr. Danstrup can also look up his personal health record online. His prescriptions are paperless — his doctors enters them electronically, and any pharmacy in the country can pull them up. Any time he wants to get in touch with his primary care doctor, he sends an e-mail message.

All of this is possible because Mr. Danstrup lives in Denmark, a country that began embracing electronic health records and other health care information technology a decade ago. Today, virtually all primary care physicians and nearly half of the hospitals use electronic records, and officials are trying to encourage more “telemedicine” projects like the one started at Frederiksberg by Dr. Klaus Phanareth, a physician there.

Several studies, including one to be published later this month by the Commonwealth Fund, conclude that the Danish information system is the most efficient in the world, saving doctors an average of 50 minutes a day in administrative work. And a 2008 report from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society estimated that electronic record keeping saved Denmark’s health system as much as $120 million a year.

Now policy makers in the United States are studying Denmark’s system to see whether its successes can be replicated as part of the overhaul of the health system making its way through Congress. Dr. David Blumenthal, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School who was named by President Obama as national coordinator of health information technology, has said the United States is “well behind” Denmark and its Scandinavian neighbors, Sweden and Norway, in the use of electronic health records.

Denmark’s success has much to do with the its small size, its homogeneous population and its regulated health care system — on all counts, very different from the United States. As in much of Europe, health care in Denmark is financed by taxes, and most services are free.

“It was a natural progression for us,” said Otto Larsen, director of the agency that regulates the system. “We believe in taking care of our people, and we had believed this was the right way to go.”

He and others acknowledged that the system is hardly perfect. It faces budget constraints , and the country is still refining common standards for electronic health records.

“We’re trying to streamline now,” Mr. Larsen said. “There are too many systems out there.”

And he is pushing to use still more information technology and to encourage more initiatives like the telemedicine project at Fredriksberg Hospital.

At Thy-Mors Hospital in the rural region of North Jutland, doctors are using I.B.M. software that pulls data from a patient’s electronic health record and superimposes it on a three-dimensional image of a human body, allowing doctors to quickly get an overview of the person’s medical history. The doctor can rotate the image, zoom in and click on ailments to get more information.

The ambulances have access to electronic medical records, so medical technicians can update them for the doctors even as patients are on their way to the emergency room.

Kurt Nielsen, the hospital’s director, says that while the doctors are not particularly adept at information technology, they have gradually embraced it. And it helps that the staff was involved in developing the innovations.

“My staff at the hospital is very, very satisfied,” he said. “We build these systems in an incremental way, and seek their input throughout.”

It remains an open question what lessons from Denmark, a nation of six million people, can be transferred to the United States.

“Denmark is probably the most advanced country in the world that I have seen,” said Denis J. Protti, a professor of health information technology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and an author of the Commonwealth Fund study. “Of course, it’s the same size as some of your states.”

Culturally, Danes are also different. Mr. Larsen, of Denmark’s health information agency, says his countrymen have few objections to the national patient registry — perhaps because they have different priorities from Americans when it comes to medical privacy.

“As long you are a healthy man, you fear for your privacy,” he said. “It is when you are sick that you wish people knew what your problem was.”

Still, Dr. Protti and other experts say the Danish experience shows that using electronic health records is efficient, cost-effective — and doable, with a little work.

Dr. John D. Halamka, another adviser to the Obama administration on electronic health records, says Denmark offers the United States a peek into the future, with some logistical variations.

Dr. Halamka, the chief information officer at Harvard Medical School, doubts that the United States will ever have a national patient registry, but he thinks that electronic medical records can succeed as long as patients have control over their own records.

Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, where Dr. Halamka is a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first hospitals in the nation to adopt electronic health records, a decade ago. It remains in a minority — about 10 percent of American hospitals and about 17 percent of American doctors use electronic records, according to studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Two of the nation’s most robust users of electronic health records are the Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the Kaiser Permanente health system. Last week, the two jointly announced that with patient authorization, electronic health records can now be shared between the systems.

At Beth Israel, patients can choose to store their electronic health records using several kinds of programs — Google Health, Microsoft Healthvault or the hospital’s own software — and they control access to their records. In the veterans’ system and at Kaiser Permanente, patients have access to their own health records.

Another challenge is the United States’ sheer size, with 50 state governments and a multiplicity of privacy laws.

Dr. Halamka is vice chairman of a federal advisory panel that has established national standards for electronic health records, meant to help states, hospitals, doctors and patients using various types of software to store their records to share information.

“The standards have been set for parties to communicate,” he said. “There’s hope, and we’re on the right trajectory.”

In Denmark, meanwhile, advocates of information technology are eager to share advice — and enthusiasm.

Mr. Nielsen, of Thy-Mors Hospital, said the transition must be gradual.

“It was done throughout some years,” he said. “It is important to know that it did not happen instantly.”

Back at the 150-year-old Frederiksberg University Hospital in Copenhagen, a nurse, Steffen Hogg Christensen, was preparing medical information kits like the one Mr. Danstrup uses.

Health information technology is no easy task, Mr. Christensen said. Training colleagues and elderly patients can be daunting and time-consuming.

“But isn’t it amazing, how innovative we can be?” he said, smiling broadly. “And all in these old walls.”

Written by SINDYA N. BHANOO, NY Times (Jan 12 2010)

A personal health record is a vital tool in maintaining a properly monitored medical treatment. Preventing abundant viral and chronic diseases these days can be a difficult task, so a complete record of your medical history is the only way of monitoring potential symptoms and taking treatments and action preemptively.

Parents concerned with their children’s health would definitely want to be in the know about what their medical conditions are at all times. A Personal Health Record empowers parents with the knowledge of their children’s conditions in order to have a better understanding between their physicians. Having access to your medical records gives you the assurance of having reliable medical information along with treatments. Additionally, personal health records save energy and money that you would otherwise spend looking up from cluttered files.
Maintaining a PHR is a must for children who are suffering from chronic diseases such as Asthma or Epilepsy, as well as allergies that require careful monitoring. With a complete and updated PHR, you can always be sure of the treatment given by physicians to be conflict free from  past conditions in an emergency or medically critical situation which may arise.
Global Patient Record™ can help doctors in identifying remedies of diseases and combating illnesses more efficiently, especially in time-constrained emergencies. It can just as well contain appointment reminders, contact information of healthcare resources, monitoring data on allergies, vaccinations, supplements and diet control of family members. These PHR features can help anyone in the family to easily go through the records and ensure that proper care is being taken.

What government policies could be in place to better spread PHR (personal health record) adoption?

I believe that that insurance companies, pharmacies, drug companies, employers and medical providers need to provide special incentives to those consumers using a PHR.  Those incentives would be in reduced insurance premiums or discounts on their drugs and doctor visits.