Its not hard to put together something basic, a personal electronic health Record is actually super easy. The adoption is the problem. Here is why:
1. People are far more likely to store and curate their vacation pictures than healthcare data. There is a behavioral aspect to this. There isn't a lot of 'feel good' attached to storing a good HDL/LDL reading. Quite the opposite when it's bad.
2. Most countries develop their own version of a EHR, sometimes controlled by patients. Success rates vary but they remain a very useful tool for managing chronic conditions and patient peri-operative journeys. Once governments (local or national level) take over, there is very little incentive for anyone to develop.
3. There have been many attempts to create a patient-led EHR by companies but it is difficult to get off the ground and sustain due to data ownership, security, sharing and commercial complexities.
4. Storing the data itself is trivial. FHIR covers this well and within haematology at least, the support for standardization is strong. LOINC, SNOMED and UCUM are well established. Just be careful to store the initial units and reference ranges.
5. My personal take is that personal EHRs will take off once a good open source p2p toolkit implements superb encryption-led access control across workflows with top institutions comes into play. This is unlikely because of how EMRs lock up provider data.
I live in a country which fortunately gets Alphonso mangoes from India. On the few occasions I have offered it to uninitiated guests and colleagues (making sure they aren't allergic first), the reaction has been a wide eyed disbelief of how good this variety is. Of course there are other varieties that are good (Langda is a close second).
If you ever get a box at home, unless rules are set and respected, it quickly becomes a free for all and people who hate welding a knife or peeling a fruit quickly become adept at it.
It is that good.
On a separate note: we live in interesting times where I can almost have a culinary-credo like I want to try the amazing food each place has to offer. Someone needs to put a list of these things - fruits, dishes, what have you and we need a serious conversation about how some of us can sample them from far away.
I wish the author could explain why he chooses to disclose that he is a _Bramhin_.
The author seems to have emigrated to a different part of the world but still mentions labels used for the longest running discrimination of humans in history.
I run a startup that links patients with specialists and surgeons around the world called [Me2MD](https://Me2MD.com). I cannot tell you the number of people who come to us with little to no idea of what to do. There is a lot of knowledge out there but no real practical advice.
Paediatric Cardiology pathways are fairly well developed and treatments for VSD and ASD are well defined.
It's just that parents (especially in developing countries) don't know how to access practical advice from experts and, more importantly, past-patients.
Having built workstations in imaging that used DICOM extensively, I disagree with the fact that DICOM is ancient and painful to work with. Yes, it is difficult to understand but there are plenty of great toolkits and examples to get started (DCMTK, dcm4che). And it also has open source implementations (dcm4chee).
DICOm has a portable media extension which let's anyone transport studies using USB, keep it in a folder. And it works well when it needs to be fed into a PACS, RIS l
It has stood the test of time when stuff like HL7 went from V2 to V3, CDA and related tailspins till FHIR came about (and let's not talk about ISO13606, OpenEHR).
It's UID space is well defined that's it's used in the aircraft inventory space.
1. People are far more likely to store and curate their vacation pictures than healthcare data. There is a behavioral aspect to this. There isn't a lot of 'feel good' attached to storing a good HDL/LDL reading. Quite the opposite when it's bad.
2. Most countries develop their own version of a EHR, sometimes controlled by patients. Success rates vary but they remain a very useful tool for managing chronic conditions and patient peri-operative journeys. Once governments (local or national level) take over, there is very little incentive for anyone to develop.
3. There have been many attempts to create a patient-led EHR by companies but it is difficult to get off the ground and sustain due to data ownership, security, sharing and commercial complexities.
4. Storing the data itself is trivial. FHIR covers this well and within haematology at least, the support for standardization is strong. LOINC, SNOMED and UCUM are well established. Just be careful to store the initial units and reference ranges.
5. My personal take is that personal EHRs will take off once a good open source p2p toolkit implements superb encryption-led access control across workflows with top institutions comes into play. This is unlikely because of how EMRs lock up provider data.