Long ago and far away in a place few would recognize now, I was a Director of Computer Applications (what we'd now call a Chief Information Officer or CIO. One of our dreams then was a portable device that patients of the hospital and medical staff could carry with them out into the big wide world that would allow doctors anywhere to access the patient's basic medical information and thus provide better, faster medical care. Microchips (the film kind) were the best technology we could come up with or a gigantic centralized database that a doctor with proper authorization could access. But a real-time, inexpensive, updateable system was always just a bit out of reach.
Thus, you might imagine my excitement when I was walking recently down the hallway of a Kaiser-Permanente facility and saw this sign
You can click on the picture to get an enlarged, readable version. The headline is "Take your medical information anywhere" and the first subhead reads "Kaiser-Permanente is happy to introduce the Portable Electronic Medical Record" Yes!! I thought. Someone has finally done it!Not wasting any time, I walked the 30 feet to Member Services and paid my $5 to get my very own Portable Electronic Medical Record (PEMR?? - you would have thought they could have spent some time on a better acronym). Here it is. Looks just like the one in the poster.
So how well have they achieved the dream? Not bad. Not all I'd like to see but they're really minor adjustments from here.What you get for $5 is a 1 gagabyte flash drive with at least 2 files - an html (browser readable) file identifying the patient and how to get hold of Kaiser worldwide. It also explains that there is a PDF (Adobe Acrobat readable) file with the patient's medical information. However, a password is necessary to access the PDF file.
Given the patient rights that exist today, it is easy to have a file readable by anyone with the password including the patient. In fact, Kaiser makes the whole medical record available on the website to patients and those authorized.
My chart was the most recent 12 months treatments as well as diagnoses, medications, lab and radiology results. They claimed to have some graphics for x-ray, EKG, etc. but on my chart said, "these were not available at the time this record was created." Very little information older than 12 months was listed. It would be wise to update your flashdrive every year. I failed to ask if there was a charge for that since you wouldn't need a new flashdrive. As it is, my medical record occupied 80 kilobytes of a possible 1 million kilobytes or 0.00008% of the drive's capacity. I give credit for KP's not crippling the flash drive with paranoia driven security software. This flash drive can actually be used for day to day data transfer as well as keeping your medical record in your pocket.
Congratulations KP and thank you. Now keep going until you've got it all on there.
This is a good idea for domestic travel, but my experience in foreign travel raises many questions regarding the usefulness of this device. I remember in Bulgaria that their technology was so far removed from ours that a flash drive would be a good key chain bobble and little else. I have found that in foreign travel nothing beats hard copy of immunizations, meds, labs, etc. Hard copy can still be read by anyone with medical expertise even in a more primitive setting. And Kaiser's hard copy files (downloaded and printed from their website) can go back several years showing trends.
ReplyDelete