“If you’re like most people, your personal medical record is a multiheaded beast: pieces of information scattered among the offices of multiple physicians, prescription data at a handful of different drugstores, and a manila folder full of receipts and lab reports in an overstuffed file cabinet at home. Now that it’s possible to tame the beast, should you? A host of Web-based personal health records, or PHRs, have been rolled out over the past few years, including offerings from Internet heavyweights Google and Microsoft. The pitch: a central repository for all your health information—from family history to lab results to cholesterol readings—gathered from all those disparate sources, and ways to share it with doctors or other people that you deem appropriate. Plus, cool tools that draw on your information to alert you, for example, if you are taking medications that might interact, or to help you track weight loss. But there are cons as well as pros to putting all your personal health information online.”
Article
Katherine Hobson, U.S. News, 16 September 2009
