And today's patient portals kind of facilitate this access in a more
limited fashion.
If you have an account with your clinic or
your doctor, or your healthcare institution and you can login and
view your data, you'll see a lot of longitudinal data.
Some data that doesn't change from visit to visit.
You'll see your past medical history, the diagnosis that you carry, your allergies,
you'll see a record of all the visits you've had with that institution.
A lot of patients ask me about allergies and blood type.
They think that that information should be front and center.
And indeed a lot of these portals do show allergies pretty clearly and
the blood type, however, is something that you might feel it's nice to know,
but it turns out that no responsible blood bank would
ever transfuse someone without confirming their blood type.
So even if you say that you're type A positive your blood is
going to be drawn and checked against that before any blood is administered to you.
The risk is simply too great and
we don't want patients to assume that risk themselves.
So, blood type, well, it's nice to know it's never going to be a crucial bit
of information that you need to communicate to your doctor.
Medication lists on the other hand are hugely important.
And I rely on them heavily in the emergency department.
And this is a key features I think of patience portals.
You can quickly log in and view all your medications,
view the time you supposed to take them and the dose.
There's still room for
improvement I think in a lot of patience portals how they display this information.
Because, really, I think this is a great opportunity for education.
As I talk to patients I talked to them on my own family members.
I see sometimes that they'e taking medications that they're not exactly sure
why and they're not exactly sure of which one is which.
They just know they are suppose to take the purple pill at 3 o'clock or
the red pill in the morning.
This is I think an opportunity for improvement.
And if you think about it, it's also an opportunity to track adherence and
let your doctor know which medications are disagreeing with you,
which one is your less likely to take.
There are some cool apps and
software tools that are coming online that are facilitating this.
For instance, WebMD has an app where you can upload all your medications and
if you have a watch, a smartwatch your
medication will show up at the point and time that you are supposed to take it.
And they can really clear for you to know what drug you are supposed to take when,
how many of those drugs you are supposed to take, and
you can even mark it as taken or skipped.
And your doctor can then review that data to see