securing distributed partial medical records?

[Wendy M. Grossman]

Roland Perry wrote:
> In article <4A6E2B02.2050202 at gmail.com>, Adrian Midgley 
> <amidgley at gmail.com> writes
>>> My hospital records are. About two inches think now. And still the first
>>> question they ask is always "when did you first get treatment for this,
>>> and why". I think it must actually be small-talk to keep me engaged
>>> while they read the bits they really want to know.
>>
>> Hospital, yes.
>>
>> But they are not accessible from your GP.
>>
>> Or to your GP.
>>
>> The indexing is sufficiently poor - absent usually - that it is probably
>> an effort to seek effectively to the right part of the file.
> 
> But isn't this what they are putting online? By contrast, there's little 
> need to put GP records online because only the GP really needs them, and 
> if you go to hospital they start a new set of records, which are then 
> needed in a dozen different bits of the hospital.

I have no medical records - the doctors I had as a child are dead or 
retired, and they came from the days when no one would give you your 
records. Later, because I moved several times, records were destroyed 
after varying lengths of time under the laws.

I would *love* a system where I was automatically given copies of 
everything. I might be good or bad at taking care of my own records, but 
I'd have had a better shot at keeping them in existence than any of the 
people who were supposedly in charge of doing that.

Does it matter? Well, it would be nice to know if my memory of being 
vaccinated against measles and never had mumps is correct, what 
treatments I was given for allergies, etc.

I now keep my own notes, but without documentation I don't know that 
anyone will trust them.

wg