Personal Health Mysteries:
How much do you know about you?
I don’t know my blood type.
Not, like: I don’t know if I’m positive or negative. I don’t know if I could give my daughter a blood transfusion. I do know that Daryl Janmaat has a 77 rating in FIFA 16, though.
You might be able to tell me how many steps you took yesterday, but could you tell me the last time you had a tetanus shot? How much do you know about your body? How much does your doctor actually know? If I pressed you, you could probably give me a better diagnostic record on your car than you could on yourself.
I study and fix healthcare problems for a living, and I have nothing resembling a personal health record. If I did, I don’t even know how valuable it would be to the physicians who care for me. Either way, I should know my blood type.
A 2011 study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association found that 47 percent of patients kept personal health records. This seems high, but I’ll buy it. Of those who did, 87 percent kept only paper records.
“Get your electronic health record: It’s your right” the LA Times scolds me. Yet it feels like I have a better chance of performing a thoracotomy than I do recovering records from one I had done by a now-retired surgeon in a now-put-out-to-pasture hospital 14 years ago. My bizarre and rambling personal health history is locked away in who knows how many servers and Draculean file folders.
Healthcare is broken partially because we allow it to be. It’s hard to demand better when you can’t answer even the simplest questions about your own body, though. I owe it to myself to pull together a functional personal health record. I’m going to do so as cheaply and expediently as possible and hopefully in doing so, I can help you do the same.
This journey through the Orc-strewn Middle Earth of modern healthcare has a few clear steps. I need to:
- Remember everywhere I’ve received relevant medical treatment
- Find out what is available online and go get it
- Chase down the information that’s not
- Assess the options available for compiling my record and decide whether I like any of them
- Use one, or make my own.
The idea of reworking the information architecture of my own health history is appealing. Especially if I can do it working with a doctor. Oh, I need to find a doctor, too.
I’ll be updating my progress here, and on twitter @justkunk. I’m also going to time every second I spend trying to pull everything together. Learn more about the work I do at Benjamin & Bond and read other writing at benjaminandbond.com.
