OT: (or not?) What is the best PHR Personal Health Record service?

[Michael Butash]

Good question - I'm a bit curious myself, but there's been no obvious 
answer.  Anyone brave enough to try something out there personally? 
I've built networks in hospitals enough to understand the commercial EMR 
apps are generally a kludge-y at best, so I'm afraid to see what they'd 
actually present outwardly for internet use as "secure".

Likewise, I shudder at giving anything to microsoft, but there's nothing 
else really.  Might be interesting (or save your own life) to do some 
machine learning on your biometrics and medical history.  Google has 
hinted, but not exactly sure I want them knowing anything more about me 
than it is.  How do you round up the data and get it in there?

Most services cater to businesses vs. individuals, and it would take a 
lot for me to trust any random company with that kind of data.  I'd 
almost rather leave it to the idiocracy of the medical industry to pack 
it away at an iron mountain facility somewhere in paper at least safely, 
myself not even knowing.  Maybe that's the point.

Watching someone go through that for an extensive background check once, 
it's pretty daunting to go to your dr and say "give me transcripts", let 
alone getting them to feed it into a 3rd party via any hipaa regulation. 
  At the end, out comes like 80 pages of, well receipts to deal with, 
and you pay for the privilege to re-input the data by hand, into 
something.  Hopefully meaningful.

Almost an exercise in "wtf", and also a bit scary to find out what the 
doctors offices are "really" charging your insurance for doing. 
Apparently common they "stretch" things, to say the least.  Much I'd 
consider downright fraud to be honest, but what does a lay person know. 
  Likely because they can.

The mostly technically inept medical industry now forced to emr can 
authorize easily internally queries and audit vs. having to harvest 
paper copies, but likely managed by equally inept software.  Once they 
figure out how to write an api to it, your info is a pay wall away, 
likely with less circumstance than likely a subpoena would require to 
give up whatever on you related to your medical conditions.

Let alone a web service api to it all with your credentials 
unencrypted/unsalted in a sql db listening public too because, well opps.

Firewalls were coming next quarter!

I'm for a home solution, bluetooth units can be had for a fair amount of 
different biometrics these days.  You can get about anything mainstream 
hardware-wise cloned out of china it seems on ebay, so ideally something 
oss as a home server talking to the peripherals persistently to record 
the data wirelessly.

Then decide if you want to feed it into facebook as a status update.

-mb


On 03/12/2013 06:05 PM, joe at actionline.com wrote:
> What is the best PHR Personal Health Record service?
>
> Actually, this may not be OT as part of the question is whether
> *open source* options may be (or not) better than commercial
> options.
>
> Google abandoned Google Health.
> Several PHR services have shuttered.
> I would never trust micro$shaft with my health records.
>
> So what is the best option now?
>
> -------
>
> Interesting thoughts :
>
> http://health.usnews.com/health-news/articles/2009/09/16/switch-to-an-online-personal-health-record
>
> Personal medical records typically involve pieces of information
> scattered among the offices of multiple physicians, prescription
> data at different drugstores, folders full of receipts and lab
> reports in an overstuffed file cabinet at home. A central repository
> for all your health information from family history to lab results
> to cholesterol readings gathered from all the disparate sources, and
> ways to share it with doctors or other people that you deem
> appropriate.
>
>
>
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