Many people are excited about having their digital health records online.

In fact, according to HealthIT.org, two out of three people would consider switching to a physician who offers access to their medical records online.

As a caregiver, the ability to have access to your families or patients medical records helps you better navigate the health system. Your role as caregiver is critical in helping those you care for get the best possible care in the most timely fashion. C

Caregivers need critical medical information to represent and provide care for their patients and loved ones. Here are some features and benefits that we believe are important to caregivers. Enjoy!

Fewer Medical Errors

(A screenshot of a demo Zweena user shows how patients can link to their healthcare providers)

If your family members or patients are visiting a medical provider on a somewhat frequent basis, caregivers can share their digital health records to the appropriate physicians.

So how does this help their health?

According to HealthIT.gov, consumers who were less active in their healthcare process suffer 36% more health consequences as a result of poor communication between providers

In fact, patients are 17% less likely to experience a medical error when they play a more active role in their healthcare experience, which proper information sharing by caregivers can play a big part in

Additionally, patients less active in their healthcare are 15% more likely to be readmitted to a hospital within 30 days of being discharged

By supplying healthcare providers with your patients complete medical history, caregivers can help ensure more accurate care, which results in reduced medical errors and potential cost savings.

Charting Health Goals

An example of how blood pressure readings are digitized for easier viewing in the Zweena Health Record

There’s no easier way for caregivers to chart a medical history than using a digital health record.

For instance: blood pressure. This is something that is taken almost every single doctor visit. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to access the blood pressures of your patients & loved ones at the tip of your fingers and understand how this vital sign has changed throughout their medical history?

Being able to see this medical history over time allows you, the caregiver, to help family members and patients make informed decisions about their health. If you see your blood pressure trending up, then you might decide it’s time you went back to yoga to clear your head and find your center, because clearly stress is beginning to impact your health.

Being Prepared in Case of an Emergency

An example of how allergies are displayed in a Zweena Health Record

Last year there were more than 129 million emergency room visits reported in the United States. To put that in perspective, 41% of the US population visited the E.R. last year alone!

Caregivers who have access to digital health records have the ability to share this information to medical providers to provide those doctors with essential information about patient & family member health.

Things like allergies, past procedures, immunization records, and more can be instantly shared to provide the necessary medical background in the event of an emergency.

In Conclusion: Digital Health Records = Healthier Patients

Those are just three reasons why caregivers who provide a digital health record to their patients can positively their health. The possibilities of how other caregivers might use an online digital health record are endless – share your thoughts in the comments section below!

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Right now Zweena is offering a limited time introductory offer of over $100 in savings meaning you can have a digital health record for only $10 a month. That’s certainly affordable enough to give it a try to see how you personally can put some of the reasons outlined above into play in your own life.
It has never been easier to get all of your health records online. Remember: it’s your health!

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John Phelan | Founder & CEO
Zweena

With over 17 years of healthcare/pharmaceutical experience, John is the vision behind Zweena. He left the pharmaceutical industry to embark on what he sees as a great opportunity to help shape and influence the developing consumer healthcare movement. John currently resides in Princeton, NJ with his wife and four children.

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This article was originally posted on www.ihealthbeat.org

Alan Blaustein

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology of the Department of Health and Human Services (say that 10 times fast…) held its 2012 Consumer Health IT Summit in Washington, D.C. this past Monday. The topic was the continuing effort to advance consumer access to health information.

Just a really quick aside — the ONC is driven by Dr. Farzad Mostashari (National Coordinator for Health IT, ONC) and his staff, under the guidance of Todd Park (the U.S. CTO). This team is the epitome of what you want your government representatives to be — progressive, open, transparent, collaborative and in pursuit of a common goal actively and consistently seeking input from both the public and private sectors. Their goal is to quickly acknowledge the issue and work hard together to find the solution. The energy of the summit was reflective of the positivity of Farzad and his team. If we all worked with the attitude of this team, the world would be a far better place and progress on all fronts would be accelerated.

OK, now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast. The focus of the summit was on the continuing effort to make health information more easily available to consumers and to engage them in using their data to improve their care and wellbeing. In particular, ONC highlighted three elements that are needed to succeed in these efforts:

• Access — getting information into the patients’ and caregivers’ hands;
• Action — engaging consumers to use the information in an effort to gain better health; and
• Attitudes — how access and action helps shift attitudes about the traditional role of patients and providers and the role technology can play in empowering patients to be more engaged partners in care.

The question of access is one on which I think we’re all finding some consensus. It is common sense that we should have access to our own health care information (it’s a legislated right, as well). As I’ve written earlier, we all have as many personal health records as we do physicians, facilities and conditions. In my case, four doctors at three institutions focusing on two conditions left me with upwards of 24 personal health records.

Think of these records as the unauthorized biographies written about your life. While you have the greatest vested interest in making sure in making sure the information is correct, somehow you’ve been left out of the creation or safekeeping of your record. Our health care records are an important part of the story of our lives — so providing access to your information only seems right so that the owner of the body and soul also owns the story.

The question of attitudes is to me more a question of accountability. To get there, we first have to figure out what everyone’s role is and then have all of the players assume the proper role. What is the patient’s job? What is the provider’s role? Who else needs to play a role? And given that every patient and provider relationship is different, will one size fit all? This will evolve over time, and the speed of this evolution is directly correlated to to the third “A” in the equation — action.

Action is where the action is. It is also where the biggest challenges exist today. We can theoretically discuss the time when the information system is seamless and we all have one record somewhere in the ether, when consumers of all kinds have the ability to access their information and where everyone understands their roles. That’s simply not the reality of today.

Let’s assume you can get access to your many personal health records. Then what? I’m supposed to understand that information, consolidate the information, interpret that information, question inconsistencies in the information, and take action on that information? I’m an educated consumer, but I’m not a consumer educated in understanding the health care system. Very few of us are. Have you ever gone to a foreign country and tried to make sense the map? Have you ever done so under the additional stress of being a patient or a caregiver where a wrong turn can be a doozy?

Today we all need help organizing this information, and then navigating and coordinating the health care needs of ourselves and our loved ones. You can say technology will solve all of this — but how is technology going to make sense of inconsistencies in your personal health records? How is technology going to understand your needs and preferences as you try to make decisions as you navigate and coordinate? The answer is that technology alone isn’t the solution — until you show me an algorithm for the health care system, you need a human element involved.

So if a human element needs to be involved, who should it be? Is it the patient or the caregiver? They’re already busy trying to figure out the system during difficult circumstances. Should it be the provider or someone in her office? It probably should be, but that’s just not how the system is set up today. The provider has limited time with the patient already and limited resources to hire a whole crew of navigators. Should it be the insurance company? Too many questions of consumer trust. If it’s not the patient or the caregiver, or the provider, it has to be a qualified individual whose job it is to help patients and caregivers keep organized and on track through the process (using technology to facilitate efficient interactions).

These navigators, advocates and careplanners are what lead patients and caregivers to action. And as time moves forward, patients and caregivers can become more comfortable with the terminology and the technologies. And as that happens, attitudes shift as everyone better understands their individual role.

There’s one more point to be made regarding action. Action is defined by audience. Clear articulation of who the audience is drives the action involved. For instance, in conversations in the health care space and at the summit, you often hear the terms “consumer,” “patient,” and “caregiver” used interchangeably. They’re not the same thing and they are seeking out different actions.

A consumer is often someone who is not presently being confronted by a health care challenge. For them, a prescription refill app might be sufficient to fill their health care needs and close the “access, action and attitude” loop. This consumer is fine using the health care system on an episodic basis, so apps alone might be the solution.

For the patient currently dealing with the health care system, having access to their right singular personal health record is vital. For the patient, having someone at the other end of the phone who can help them get from point A to point B is important. For the patient, the action is making sure everyone is informed and the patient is best educated so that the patient can play a role in her health care. The patient needs more than an app to do this.

And for the caregiver, it’s about having the information when and how they need it. In addition to the right personal health record, the caregiver cares to know the 10 numbers he or she would need to call. For the caregiver, the action is making sure they’re organized at all times. And “at all times” implies a lifelong relationship with the system that sees both times of crisis and times of organizing to avert any oncoming crisis.

With the right set of actions for the right audiences based on the right access, attitudes will evolve and accountability will be achieved. It’s going to take a lot more conversations like the one the summit promoted, but these discussions are a step in the right direction.*

Zweena is a cloud-based Personal Health Record service provider that collects, assembles, digitizes and stores health and medical records in a secure platform connected to  Microsoft HealthVault.  The Zweena PHR is easy to access, manage and share with you health providers any time,  anywhere . Sign up today.

*This article was originally published in the HuffingtonPost on 09/11/2012.

Alan Blaustein is the founder of CarePlanners.com and is a regular contributor of the HuffingtonPost.

Well, combined with a preexisting condition often mistaken for an aesthetic problem, a UTI turned into a nightmarish complication that could’ve killed her. Let her tell you her story:

I was on a business trip and I could no longer stand the pain in my leg. I had to do something, so I went to the ER. Since I was neither bleeding nor screaming, I had to wait before a doctor could see me.

 I kept thinking about my children at home with my mother.  

I had seen a doctor earlier at a local Medical Practice who had examined my leg and decided it was nothing “major” and that “the swelling would subside gradually on its own”. See, I had a urinary tract infection, UTI as they call it, and swollen legs are not uncommon.

I don’t generally go to the doctor because I need a massage, which was basically what the doctor had suggested and something felt wrong. I couldn’t let it go, so I went to the ER that night.

I told them about the infection and the antibiotics, cephalexin, that I felt weak and had difficulty breathing. They told me it was a “normal reaction” to antibiotics; “they’re attacking the infection and the body weakens”. They told me that if the pain hadn’t subsided in a few hours they would “consider” changing them, but that I had to give it time.

 I came back still with pain in my leg and they prescribed some ibuprofen for the pain and sent me home.

The next day I was rushed into the ER again because I had collapsed and had trouble breathing.

I had a blood clot in my leg and it had started to travel to my left lung.

I could have died.

It turns out that cephalexin is a type of antibiotics often used to treat resilient UTIs, with a side effect that affects women over 50. I have varicose veins or vein insufficiency, a problem often considered aesthetic and my body reacted poorly to the antibiotics.

  I spent thousands of dollars in medical bills for the subsequent treatment to keep the blood clot from reaching my lungs and had to undergo several painful procedures that now I know, could have been avoided.

  I will never be unprepared again. I owe it to my family.

Laura Parson, Illinois.

Ms. Laura Parson, whose name we changed at her request, shared this experience as a “life-changer” adding that she felt “partly grateful” because it made her “look at [her] life through different eyes”.

Often, people only consider keeping a PHR in times of need; fortunately Mrs. Parsons’ story had a happy ending, but that is not always the case.

It’s hard for doctors to keep track of everything in the patient’s chart and sometimes information gets buried or overlooked. It is because we let others decide for us, that misinformed decisions are made, misdiagnosis issued and lives lost in the end.

A digital, web-based record, like Zweena’s allows the patient, their care-giver and physicians to quickly sort through large amounts of data which improves care quality.

A health record is simply a collection of your health information (like your dietary habits, fitness, physical abilities/status, hormonal balance, age, weight, blood pressure, etc.) and your medical records, those files that your physicians keep and update whenever you pay them a visit for a checkup, or go into the emergency room.

Here’s the thing: Medical Records are usually not available to patients and in times of need, it can be ridiculously expensive to put one together and the sad part is you may not even have the time to do that.

You, or a loved one, may run out of time. (See Regina Holiday’s personal crusade to get her husband’s records)

Why You Need a Personal Health Record

You have a right as a patient, and the obligation as proactive member of our society, to have a Personal Health Record – a collection of all of those Lab Results, X-Rays, Treatments, Prescriptions, Appointments, Weight-loss plans and Medical Records in one place.

A place that is accessible to YOU.  Because, it’s YOUR health.

You Need a Personal Health Record Because:

1. It allows you or a physician to make better health decisions in the long run.
2. It improves accurate medical response in a crisis.
3. It reduces misdiagnosis and the hazards or expenses associated to it.
4. It saves you time and money in routine checkups.
5. It reduces the number of medical appointments, by allowing a direct connection between physician and patient.
6. It enables self-monitoring, which means you can keep your own track on glucose, blood-pressure, diet, medications and more.
7. It makes care-giving for the elderly, disabled, or physically/mentally impaired easier and more effective.

It puts you as a patient, or caregiver, In Control of the health, and medical, decisions that affect you and the ones you love.