This article is republished here courtesy of the Minerva’s Diary, the Jarvis Alumni Journal. To see the entire April 2010 issue, click here
The days of having one doctor to handle your medical needs are gone the way of black and white movies. The future is more 3D Avatar than Technicolor. We now have multiple health professionals that we deal with. We need better tools to communicate with these professionals so that the few minutes we have with our healthcare professionals results in the best possible outcome.
When you see your doctor are you prepared? Do you have a list of meds that you are taking, how about vitamins? Do you know what you HDL and LDL cholesterol, have you got a list of questions or know what you want to talk to them about?
Your family doctor is only one part of your health care team. If you have young children it is likely you also have a pediatrician, as a women you may also have a gynecologist, a man may also have an urologist or depending on age a cardiologist. You may go to a naturopath, a chiropractor or an allied health professional. If you have aging parents you are most likely involved in their care and be dealing with oncologists, homecare and long-term care issues.
Figuring out where your health information is can be quite tricky. Below is a schematic of some of the individuals that might have segments of your health information. You can see that the second circle to the right is the Clarity Health Journal. This is YOUR health record. Where YOU can feed all of the information in and retain the records. This would be the only complete health record. This allows YOU to have the full health record. YOU get to decide who has access to the full record.
The Clarity Health Journal was created out of a frustration to better maintain family health information. My in-laws died of cancer and by the end of their care we had a brief case that we carried around from doctor to home care to oncologist that was full of the pertinent health information about my in-laws. When they were in the hospital and at home we had a note book in which we recorded everything that happened. Then when a different family member took over, they could see what had been going on.
If you have a family member that needs regular medical care, be it juvenile diabetes (Type 1) or Type 2 diabetes; cardiac care, asthma, cancer or AIDS you know the importance of maintaining and monitoring health details. The Clarity Health Journal lets you record all of the details in one spot. You can create .pdf documents and charts of results over time and send them to your physician in advance or you can print out your history and take it in with you.
This is not the future. This is now. Now you can download a free “untethered” version of CHJ at clarityhealthjournal.com. “Untethered” means that it is stand alone for your home computer. The web based and smartphone version is about to be launched later this year.
