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| If there's one thing I wish I could go back and do over, it would be keeping better track of my medical history. Unfortunately, this is not something that they teach you as a patient or a parent and medical facilities in fact make it rather difficult to obtain this information. I learned this the hard way when I was in my mid 20's. I found myself trying to gather 20 years of medical history from various hospitals. I was hoping that some of you might have a good resource, or system to share that has worked well, or any recommendations for parents and patients new to the health care system. Anything to make life a little easier.  |
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Last Login: 6/23/2008 6:00:13 AM
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| I completly agree! Each time we went for a visit or before we were discharged from the hospital, I asked for copies of everything, her entire file and kept copies for home. It also makes it much easier to give new doctors the info they need.
Proud Mom of a strong little girl living with Gorham's Disease |
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| I bought and office calendar and wrote things on it. I didn't do a new calendar every year, i wrote the year on the date. I also bought a notebook, that I took with us to every doctor visit, every hospital stay. I took notes everytime someone came in and told us something. Robin also kept most of her medical records.
Blessedmom |
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Last Login: 6/26/2008 9:31:26 PM
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| I started with a 3-ring binder with dividers, but Brittany's records rapidly outgrew that system andit became too cumbersome to be useful. Still it is a good place to start.
Last year I bought an all-in-one printer for the house that saves scanned documents to the computer in PDF format. I get copies of labs, test results, etc., scan them to the computer in PDF and back up the files to a thumb drive that I can put in my purse.
The master file is called simply Brittany's Medical Records. Within that master are sub-files named lab, surgery, pathology reports, pulmonary function tests, etc. Each document is named by the date of the record in year-month-day format (ex: 2008-06-13) and saved to the applicable sub-file. Lab records only get a date. Radiology and surgery records get a longer name that includes the type of scan/surgery and where done (ex: 2008-06-13 CT head LSU).
Radiology records come on CD now instead of the big films in envelopes, so I ask for a disk every time a test is done and I keep those in the old 3-ring binder in plastic sleeves you can buy at the office supply store for CDs. You can amass a huge number of CDs and that gets cumbersome, so every so often I ask for a disk with all studies from a certain period of time (the last 3 months or the last 6 x-rays) and I throw away the CDs with single studies and write the index on the back of the batched CD envelope. You get a feel for how often based on what tests are being done and where. The facilities have always been very helpful with this and I have never been charged a fee.
I print copies of the reports that are most relavent to a particular doctor visit. Usually this consists of the last set of labs or most recent x-ray done by a different doc, but sometimes it means a pathology report or consult note. And the thumb drive is in my purse in case they ask for anything I didn't think of. |
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