Surgeon General Offers Updated Family Health Tool

If you have ever gone to the emergency room in the middle of the night, had to see a doctor while in another city or state, or changed doctors in your life, you have no doubt been privy to the ominous clipboard with a stack of paper up to your chin and a pen almost out of ink in which to fill out the forms. As dreaded as that experience is, I know that a lot of the questions in the past have been left blank on my forms because I am not up to speed on my family’s health history. Did any one of my relatives ever have heart disease or diabetes? Is there a history of blood clots or neurological disorders? If this sounds familiar and you wish you could know immediately what your health history is, the surgeon general and the Department of Health and Human Services are here to help.

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The idea behind the program is simple. The government bands together with the National Cancer Institute in order to put together an online database for families to essentially create a family tree of health history that can also be uploaded to a personal computer (or possibly a PDA) for immediate access. The government denies being able to access your personal history or obtain a copy of it for general use, which ensures your privacy.

By keeping a lineage of health conditions accessible and current through the Internet, you could use the tool to send to family members in order to complete or confirm the results or you could send them right to your health care provider in order to ensure better-quality care by informing your doctor to the possibility of genetic conditions or discrepancies that may alter your present form of care.

Secretary of HHS Mike Leavitt—who’s Personalized Health Care Initiative the new version was adopted under—says, “This valuable tool can put family histories to work to improve patient well-being and the quality of care….The tool is built on health information technology standards that make it more convenient for consumers and more useful for practitioners.  It is ready for use in electronic health records.  And its software code will be openly available to other health organizations, so they can customize and build on its standards base.”

My Family Health Portrait helps extended families to build on an existing family member’s “health information tree” by re-indexing the information. All information you include on the site is private and seen only by you and whomever you decide to send it to. However, if your aunt, brother, or third cousin wants to plot their history alongside yours, once you send it to another part of the family they can log in and “re-index” the tree to focus the center on their immediate family, making it easier for them to build the branches from their point of view instead of simply adding it to your pre-made family formula.

Cancer advocate for prevention and detection, Lance Armstrong hopes to provide the link on his website, “A strong family health history tool can be an important element for guiding medical decision-making, especially in the area of cancer screening, prevention and early detection,” Lance continues by saying, “This tool will further the capabilities of electronic health records and takes a significant step toward improving clinical care.”

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