Focus International

A personal health record is a health record initiated and maintained by an individual. It can be in the form of a handwritten health diary, but in today’s information age it is most practical and efficient if it is based on a local computer with functionality allowing the exportation of data to a USB flash drive. Implementing a personal health record entails gathering as much information about your past and current health and organizing it in such a way that it can be easily retrievable and reproducible for circumstances that might require its use. The starting point is to choose a personal health record which will allow you to enter typed information as well as information and official documents such as x-ray reports, laboratory reports and electrocardiograms. Ideally, the program should have a resource to allow you to learn more about your medical condition and should be secure and encrypted with password protection of your personal data. Other desirable features include the ability to store health information about your family members as well as yourself, technical support in using the program, ease of transferring information into it and from it to your health care provider and flexibility in the reproduction of the data. All these factors considered, a local computer-based personal medical records software application is probably the most logical choice. After choosing a personal medical records software program and installing it on your computer the next step involves locating and gathering all the paper documents you may have in your home or elsewhere containing information about your health.