Comment by mazelife | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mazelife | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of funny to me that every single one of these more or less came true with one notable exception: "Have you ever carried your medical history in your wallet?" As it stands today, at least in the US, most people's medical history is still fragmented across dozens of proprietary, non-interoperable EMR systems or locked away in paper charts in doctors' offices. I can't think of a single company that's tried to play in the personal health portal space—Google included—that hasn't failed utterly.

Digitization of health data has increased massively since 93' of course, but the landscape is still completely Balkanized and there is a growing body of clinicians who believe healthcare IT is actively making healthcare worse.[1] Put another way, the idea of a complete, centralized, useful medical medical history being available for everyone in the US still seems like a pipe dream. Interesting discussion to be had about how, in this particular industry, progress has been so slow...

[1]https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha... and https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/magazine/heal... for example

In Ontario 15 years ago, my health card had a mag stripe they could swipe. But I don't know if it pulled up my medical file or if that stripe is still on the health cards.

Part of it, along with my photo, a hologram, and 5 year expiry date, was really meant to prevent insurance fraud from out of province people. ie: Americans.

Ontario health cards still have the mag stripe, 2D bar code, and photo hologram. I don't think they've changed since the old red and white cards that didn't have photos.

Australia is adopting a single source for medical history. I'm half-excited and half-terrified. It will be a goldmine for research over time. And possibly (probably) a goldmine for bad actors.

I, and everyone I've talked to about it, has opted out of the MyHealth record system.

Context for those outside of Australia - The Australian government developed a digital health record system, My Health Record, without ensuring proper protection of the data (42 data breaches in 2017-18 [1]).

There were also no safeguards or legislation in place to prevent employers, insurers or authorities from being granted access to your health record at launch.

1: https://www.digitalhealth.gov.au/about-the-agency/publicatio...

Same. Nefarious purposes aside, their track record with technology over here seems to make a "Nobody could see it coming!" data loss moment inevitable.

I knowingly chose not to opt out, despite being terrified at the coming leaks. Everyone non-technical I know didn't know or care it was happening.

It may not be unified, but you can install the app for each of your provider's EMR systems (which are mostly all front ends to the same Epic Systems multi-tenant backend)

I went through some medical issues a few years ago and took to carrying all of my medical records on a tiny USB flash drive. I took this to a few consultations and doctors could not use it due to policy and/or fear of plugging an unvetted device into their system. It's a terrible outcome of the modern security landscape that the only path is cloud storage for our medical records.

They were so close to nailing "...tuck in your baby" but they had to add a phone booth. LOL

I consider FaceTime or Skype to be a good enough representation of this. It's still in the spirit of it. Something along the lines of "phones will be able to do video calls. And so wherever you are while you're away -- at a hotel or even on the side of the street -- you will be able to tuck your baby".

The only thing they missed was that you'd be able to carry such phones on your person, in your pocket. They couldn't fathom that we'd get really good at packing all that functionality into something so small.

Taiwan does this, as far as I know.

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