Scanadu Blog Where is Your Medical Record?

How is it possible!!! More than half of the savvy, health-curious people who engaged at Scanadu.com report they don't know where their medical record is located.Your own medical record should be among the most compelling, valuable and treasured documents that you own. After all, it's the story of your health, your most vital asset. It's intimate. It's powerful. It's the story of how you got to where you are today, and where you are headed.So how can it be that 37% of people who responded to our question don't even know where it is? The people aren't the problem. The record is.Time for a Major Change1. The medical record is fragmented.For most people, it's broken into pieces and hidden in different locations like a Horcrux from Harry Potter. Part may be with their primary care physician (if they have one). Part may be with specialists, part in a hospital or urgent care clinic.Old records may be even more scattered. And that's not even considering where prescription records are stored. Or valuable parts of the story like your FitBit or Withings or MyFitnessPal data.2. The medical record is behind a maze of barriers.I can use my ATM card at any bank's ATM to get money from my account. Trying to get my records is like a Saturday Night Live skit of a nightmare at the DMV. The different rules and procedures at each place would be comic if they weren't tragic. Lack of immediate access to someone's health information kills 80,000 people a year in the US.3. Someone else thinks they own your medical record.Sometimes there is even a copying fee when people get their records. This should change. The doctor or insurance company should pay copying fees, if any, for their copies. Not the patients...I treasure a jacket painted for me by Regina Holliday as part of her Walking Gallery. In 2009, Regina's 39-year-old husband Fred was diagnosed with cancer. Regina asked to see her husband's medical records, so that she "could do online research of his condition and care, and so that they could make informed decisions together.At the first of five hospitals he was admitted to during this medical ordeal, on April 18, 2009, she was told that copies of his records would cost $.73 per page and would be available after a 21-day wait. That would have been May 9, 2009." 73 cents really adds up over a box of medical records in a cancer case. It was beyond their immediate means. Fred died at home on June 17, 2009.4.The medical record is confusing.Even if you complete the scavenger hunt, overcome the obstacles, and get clear title and possession of your record, what you are left with is a confusing mess. HEENT? PERRLA? EOMI? Unintelligible jargon and abbreviations obscure the meaning. Google Translate can decipher a page of Uzbek, Zulu or Gujarati text at the touch of a button. But not a Medical Record.Even if were translated into clear language, it's often a patchwork of different types of data and hard to tell what's important and what's not.5. The medical record is bloated and repetitive.I've sat in a waiting room filling out forms on a clipboard (recently!) and entered the same piece of information 5 times. I regularly review old charts of my patients and see so much duplicate information. It's almost like it's not designed to be succinct and informative.6. The medical record is boring.We humans love stories. We revel in them. We grip our seats at tense moments in thrilling movies. We are inspired by calls to action in moving speeches. We even respond to pure statistics elegantly displayed. The medical record reads more like a boring accounting textbook than narrative nonfiction.7. The medical record wasn't written for you.And that's the core of both the problem and the opportunity. It's an excellent tool to support and justify medical billing. It's a very good medico-legal document. It's serviceable as a communication and memory tool for doctors (though ask a doctor sometime whether they like the medical record platform they use). It's sorely lacking for you.We need a medical record created for the people, with the people.That simple change in focus could solve every problem above.Before digital photography, if you asked someone what possessions they would grab from their burning home, photos were among the top answers. Today photos are stored digitally, but if you were to ask what you would want rescued from a failed hard drive or a cloud malfunction, photos would still be high on the list.A well-designed medical record should be on that list.Over the coming months, we will be asking more simple questions to learn how people interact with the complex health care system around the world. This conversation will help inform the products we are building at Scanadu. See for yourself at scanadu.com.*note: this blog post was updated to reflect the latest survey results.