Your Cat Has Easier Access to Medical Records than You
By Carol Schadelbauer, August 10, 2015
Putting the patient at the center of his or her own care is becoming a reality as our health care delivery goes through major transitions. Patients are becoming more engaged with their doctors online, in the office and at home with the increased availability of new technologies such as phone apps to watch weight or wristbands to measure sleep and exercise. And they are gaining access to their medical records more quickly through online portals.
This is all good news, but cats and dogs have had it this good long before us humans. Why is this?
In his blog published last week in the leading health policy journal Health Affairs, Jose Pagan, PhD, Director of the Center for Health Innovation at The New York Academy of Medicine, describes this conundrum through his experiences with his own children and pets (Mosby the cat and Chato the dog). The New York Academy of Medicine is focused on health solutions for people living in cities, and Dr. Pagan is not only passionate about improving health and health care access for all people (and pets), but he is currently collaborating with IBM on ways to use big data to determine the environmental and socio-economic factors that may impact our health down to the neighborhood level.
Human health is determined by so many factors, and it is complex. But as Dr. Pagan would say, we only make it more complex by making it nearly impossible for us to understand our own diagnosis and test results.
His call to action: “Providers must engage consumers and think harder about novel, feasible strategies to improve the usability of web portals for medical records.”
