Owning Your Own Medical Records

Owning Your Own Medical Records

When a patient visits their doctor, the doctor spends considerable time thoroughly documenting the patient’s vitals and medical complaints before deciding on a treatment plan. Oftentimes, patients will also be sent to receive imaging or lab tests. All of this detailed information on the patient is then consolidated together into the patient’s medical record.

While this first doctor has collected detailed information on the patient, data is rarely shared with the patient’s other doctors. For example, if this first doctor refers the patient to a specialist, the specialist often won’t receive the information they need on the patient ahead of the visit.¹ Instead of being able to view the patient’s existing record, this specialist is forced to re-document information from scratch and make their clinical assessments in isolation from the first doctor. Instead of a single record, the now patient has two records, both of which are incomplete.

Because data sharing between doctors is so limited, it falls to patients to collect their medical records from each of their doctors and make sure that important information is available at the point of care. This is no easy task for patients. Almost half of patients have difficulty assessing their own medical records and a third of patients physically carry critical documentation like labs and images from one doctor to the next.² To address this issue, we need a patient-centric solution that simplifies the aggregation of data for the patient and makes it easy for patients to securely share their medical records with their doctors.

Coral Health’s Lab Records System

One of Coral Health’s first applications, our lab records system, will address a challenge that most patients face today: accessing and sharing their own lab results. Coral Health is partnering with labs to give patients a single place to quickly receive new lab results, interpret those results, view earlier results, and share their lab results with any doctor they choose. Below we discuss some of the key features of the application.

Receiving results: When a patient visits a partner lab, they can give the lab permission to directly send them their results using Coral Health’s lab record application. Results are encrypted by default and only the patient has the decryption key needed to access their data.

Viewing and interpreting lab results: Patients will be alerted the moment new results are available. Patients can then quickly access their results along with a simple explanation of what their results mean. Lab data will be stored cumulatively so patients can access earlier results and see trends in how their lab measures are changing over time.

Sharing results: Our lab application will make it easy for patients to share their lab data. Patients can either give specific doctors access to all of their results or only share a subset of their lab results.

Communicating with doctors: Patients have the option of either messaging their doctor about their results or requesting targeted health recommendations from our marketplace of physicians.

Join our Telegram community or check out our GitHub to see how we’re progressing on the MVP!

References

1. Forrest CB, Glade GB, Baker AE, et al. Coordination of specialty referrals and physician satisfaction with referral care. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2000; 154: 499–506.

2. Connected Care and the Patient Experience. Surescripts. http://surescripts.com/connectedpatient/default.html (accessed 3 December 2017).

Original article and pictures take cdn-images-1.medium.com site