It’s the age of active participation in your own health care. Comprehensive new systems are evolving to help you create a personal health record in the cloud. But, are you organized at home to maintain the rest of the personal records you need for long term well-being? Probably not, if you are like most people. For example, where’s your prescription plan? Who are your specialists? If you are in a caregiving situation, who do you call in an emergency? There’s a lot more to managing your own health care than hosted medical records.
The place to start managing your health care is at home. The first step is to get organized. Get all your important health care related information together in one place so you can find it when you need it. Personal record keeping software can help. It gives you an organizing framework. All you have to do is fill in the blanks. Anyone with a home computer can store and manage their personal health records along with those of their family. But, you can also enter the rest of your vital information such as financial, legal, insurance, retirement, pension, caregiving, living and end of life wishes to complete your personal health record. That’s something you can’t do with the new hosted medical record systems coming online. And, if you are worried about privacy and security, no internet connection is required. The information is stored at home, on your computer. No one but you, or your authorized designee, can access it. If you are in a home caregiving situation, you can support your caregiver with access to the information so he or she can have it at their fingertips for those times when a decision is called for on-the-spot. That one feature alone can relieve a lot of the stress for everyone in the caregiving network, including the person being cared for. You can help them live the life they are used to if you know what to do.