[specialist]

Hi Noga. Forgive me, I'm not understanding. How do I get my health records?

I designed and implemented the backend(s) for 5 regional health exchanges, did some front end work on our physicians portal, prototyped the patient portal (shopped around to our clients). I also participated in the competitive NHIN interop effort (we were a sub on the Northrup Grumman team). If you've seen the Mirth stack, my stuff was roughly the same (at the time).

Every participant in our exchange (hospitals, labs, scripts, clinics, insurers) jealously guarded their data, hoping to monetize it.

Maybe the scope of "meaningful use" has expanded, but when it started it was just a dozen or so fields. (The phrase "meaningful use" seemed to be an example of unintentional irony.)

I can't gleen your business model. And unless you have data access / sharing agreements, I don't see how you can get my records. (I'm a few years out of date, so maybe things have changed.)

If you were creating a "white label" patient portal for your customers (e.g. hospitals) to implement, that'd be cool.

If you were kickstarting a lobbying group to empower patients with access to their own data, I'd definitely contribute.

[nogaleviner]

Think mint.com for medical records. Literally. We help patients find their patient portals. We credential them in (just like mint) with username and password, providing a tool that pulls their data out. We normalize it and display in a meaningful way. Then we go back to the hacky solution of automating e-faxing back out to keep other doctors in the loop.

It's definitely nuts that this would be the solution, but I don't think we can wait for HIEs or for someone to get data access/sharing agreements for exactly the reason you state. Every player is jealously guarding their data.

You're right that we don't get the complete record, but whats in there is actually pretty rich.

[mazimi]

Mint.com helps me with financial planning and budgeting. What does access to my medical records help me with? As a patient, does access to historical lab values provide me with actionable information or are the latest results, communicated to me by my physician more valuable? Do you use a predictive model to provide the patient with a health forecast (ie. https://archimedesmodel.com/indigo, they have an API)?

I check my Mint.com account regularly, what would drive me to check my Picnic account regularly?

[vpontis]

Hi Mazimi, I'm Victor and working as an engineer at Picnic this summer.

At first we are targeting patients with chronic illnesses. These patients often see doctors in different systems and are not able to view all of their medical information in one place. Picnic will consolidate their data and provide it in an easy to view fashion.

Focusing on patients with chronic illnesses will also help us give meaning to the data. We have a doctor on the team who is categorizing all of the tests as per different conditions and explaining how certain key tests are relevant to your condition. With the explanation, the tests gain meaning and you can see how your health is faring over time.

In the future, we will want to extend these explanations and information to healthy patients to give everyone insight into their health.

As for archimedesmodel, at this point we are not looking at giving health forecasts. We want Picnic to be a tool that clearly shows data to the patient and allows them to have a more productive conversation with their doctors. In the future we may consider extending the feature set.

[specialist]

My insurer does a terrible job of tracking my deductible (burn rate). And there's no integration with HSA/FSA. And no tracking of my recurring expenses like scripts.

In other words, I would LOVE a healthcare themed mint.com.

[daigoba66]

This is a key point; your medical records are fairly opaque without a doctor's interpretation.