Is There Any Electronic Gadget For Storing Medical Records?

[JesusHhrr]

Hello all, due to the difficulty in maintaining the bulky records of medical history I am looking out for any electronic gadget to manage the complete medical history of my father. I have gone through many of the services which give a wide range of electronics gadgets but couldn’t find any for maintaining the medical history electronically. If anyone from you knows any of such devices, then please let me know. Any help is appreciated.

[phaethon]

I work in telemedicine, which is the transfer of medical data from remote patients to doctors for evaluation. The trouble is keeping them in a format that is secure and readable by as many people as possible. Big organizations tend to shell out for their own systems which (can) work within the organization but often encounters difficulties in transferring it to others - on the up side that is a form of security in itself

There is a standard called DICOM for digital images which is widely, but not universally, adopted however it is not really a personal solution - software for converting and viewing tends to be written for big systems with big budgets. One big problem with medical images is ensuring they are not tampered with between creation and their being used as evidence in a medico-legal case. I had to provide images of a child abuse case once and it involved a copper travelling the length of the UK to stand over me while I extracted the original files in original format from the instrument that took the photos.

For personal use your best bet is a cheap laptop with acrobat reader. Scan your written notes and store them as PDFs (I use cutePDF freeware). Images should be scanned and stored at the highest resolution you can manage and in a lossless format such as bitmap or PNG. Even the most backwards quack can cope with PDFs. These days you can ask healthcare providers for digital copies of scans and x-rays but they may refuse out of fear breaking confidentiality/security or, more likely laziness or inability to work the equipment's export function.

Finally you have to consider the security of the laptop both physical and login access and encrypt the data in case it does fall into the wrong hands.

Even so, don't be surprised if doctors these days are reluctant to rely on records from unprovenenced sources: They'll have one eye on their malpractice insurance and one on the opportunity to perform repeat (billable) procedures.

Edited October 16, 2008 by phaethon

[chakatee]

There is such a thing called a "Thumbdrive". Save all data as images or in different formats, hang it on your key chain and there you have a nice electronic gadget fit for the job.

[chakatee]

P.S. If you don't have a key chain to hang a thumbdrive on, make your own website (password protected) where you publish your medical record in whatever format you like.

Doctor wants to see something? Give him a (temporary) password or log in for him.

[mrtoad]

If you don't want to purchase a thumb drive, I suggest that maybe you also look at MiFile.

https://vault2.secured-url.com/mifile/default.asp

Basically this is an online system, so practitioners can access your medical details from pretty much anywhere in the world. You have to put your information into the system, and it is up to you, on how much you want to enter.