[LINK] Your Medicare records online

[Darryl (Dassa) Lynch]

link-bounces at mailman1.anu.edu.au wrote:
||| If I get wheeled into a medical facility in some outpost in an
||| uncommunicative state, I'd hope that they had all relevant history
||| before taking any action.  Cheers iT
|| 
|| 
|| Agreed. In this small country-town-outpost, we have a
|| medical practice that is sometimes staffed by a doctor (it
|| varies a lot) and when it is it's fairly often by some
|| unknown young newbie locum.
|| 
|| And at the larger town practices (all at least an hour or so
|| away) the waiting list is several months. Thus, as a result,
|| residents here tend to have a catch-doctor-as-catch-can
|| medial consultation history.
|| 
|| If these newbie doctors, (to us, and fairly often, newbie to medicine
|| doctors) which we are sometimes lucky to be able to consult,
|| (country medical-staffing is quickly getting worse) all have
|| medical histories readily available, i think the health of
|| country folk especially will surely benefit. At least, it
|| might help newbie docs to avoid mistakes.
|| 
|| It's fine for city-centric folk who have the luxury of
|| permanence and choice in terms of doctors, and health care,
|| but we country folk with very patchy (literally) medical
|| care, really need some form of record keeping of our medical
|| records which are available literally anywhere.

I'm always confused about how our medical records belong to the service
providers and not ourselves.  My personal choice would be for each
individual to be responsible for their own medical records and they can
provide them to what ever service provider they happen to be seeing at the
time.

Isn't it just lazy to expect the service providers to look after our records
for us, shouldn't we be keeping our own records?

A better investment to me would be technology that would make it easier for
individuals to keep all their records in a handy portable form they can
carry with them as required.  Or at the very least, the individual to
control the key that would make a central repository of the data available
to the service provider of their choice.

Darryl (Dassa) Lynch