Why Personal, Online Medical Record Keeping is Imperative

In today’s world, people tend to relocate, switch physicians, and otherwise change their lives fairly often. A few years ago, most of us would likely see the same doctor and attend the same hospitals and clinics for most of our lives. Today? We’re a little more mobile.

This has created some upheaval and even discontinuity in many people’s medical histories.

Consider this scenario: your son is accepted into college and leaves for school. A few weeks later, he g-d forbid, is in an accident and unconscious. He is on special medications and the doctor’s at the ER aren’t likely to know. He has a regular physician he’s signed up with, but has yet to go in for a first visit and orientation. Does anyone have access to his medical records?

That phone call can go several ways. It could go like this: the ER physician asks if there is anything he should know, but you can’t remember the name of the prescription he’s taking. Instead of guessing and wasting time, you give the physician a login to Medefile. He gets your son’s full patient history and knows what to do.

That is only one of many hundreds of reasons that online medical record keeping, in a secure environment, is paramount in today’s fast-changing world. Even a simple scenario such as your son never having had the accident (thank goodness!) and instead visiting his new physician for the first time. Rather than giving his doctor a verbal run-down of his background, he could instead give the doctor a login for his Medefile and then talk to her about the information contained in there. This gives the doctor a full view of your son’s medical history and makes discussion much less hit-and-miss.

Our lifestyles are not static. We no longer stay on the family farm from birth to death. We are on the move, ever-changing. Our lifestyles demand that many things, from phones to computers to medical files, be portable so they can move with us.