Doctors to patients: Track your own health data

December 14, 2010 by Anonymous

By Keeley Wray

A pregnant woman wants to monitor her baby's activity in response to the foods she eats. She takes her smart phone, plugs in an ultrasound adapter and takes readings after every meal. She logs the contents of her meal and presto! Pattern recognition software tells her that her baby is unfavorably sensitive to dairy. Through a personally controlled portal, she remotely loads the information to her hospital's electronic medical record system, for review by an allergist at the time the baby is born.

A man with a diabetic foot ulcer takes home two different topical creams. He takes daily pictures of the ulcer, and using image processing algorithms, he learns which medication is promoting optimal healing. He sends this information to his personally controlled healthcare record (PCHR), where it is uploaded to a database monitored by researchers who are correlating genetic data to treatment responsiveness.

In the future, users may be able to process electronic health records (EHR) data with their application of choice and return it to their permanent record via a personally controlled portal. They may be able to add new data to the record that they collect via mobile devices or other inputs.

Currently, this vision of the future may seem overly optimistic, given the inflexibility and proprietary formats of existing EHR databases. But if the database structure could be made into an open standard, and redesigned to receive new types of data, a consumer-focused approach to medical data management might really be possible. Some software developers, such as Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and Google (NSDQ:GOOG), already offer personally controlled health records that aggregate data from multiple providers.

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