The game of life as seen from the cloud

In my book, Talking to Your Doctor, I discuss at length the importance of the doctor-patient relationship, and how mindful communication can strengthen that relationship to the benefit of our health.

What do we do, however, to encourage that relationship when our health care system encourages fragmentation? Even if we had a single payer system, the variety of specialists, health care settings, and treatment o

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ptions makes it unlikely that one person will see one provider for all – or even most? – of their health care needs. 

I try to outline one answer in my book, based on communication. Another answer, as many other people have proposed, has to do with portable electronic health records that are secure and located on reliable servers (the “cloud”). If we can’t be sure that our primary care provider has all our health care data, we can make sure that we do. 

But if that record is really to represent us, ourselves, we need to organize it differently than today’s electronic medical records. They should not be based on the individual visit, or the atomized problem list, but on our entire life and what we find important in it: the domains of our existence that we wish to optimize and ensure through good health.

Of course, a blog post is not the way to elaborate at length on what a record like this would look like. But little by little…