 

Health records are seeing a resurgence of interest as companies roll out creative new ways to let people interact with their health information.

Lets take a deep dive

**1) Change is a foot**

Companies are making it possible for users to access all of their medical encounters, no matter how unwieldy the format.

**2) How?**

PicnicHealth for example as built a system to field everything from PDFs to unstructured doctor's notes to let its users focus on self-care rather than data management.

**3) Why?**

Turning unstructured data into structured data is really meaningful. Giving patients practical, tangible control over their data = better health. Patients with a chronic or serious illness often see multiple providers.

**4) Why do we need this?**

The answer is two fold -

People talk about the work of being a patient, and how it’s essentially a project manager job. Being forced to see a provider ontop of being sick and worrying if all the necessary data is in order is a pain point.

**5) Part two**

Insurer or the research organization running a study are willing to sponsor accounts for patients and pay the subscription. Putting all this information in one place would be a major value-add for both the patient &amp; the insurer/researcher.

**6) How is this better?**

The secret sauce is being able to do all that grunt work of getting data that’s not available through APIs. Those only give you 10 to 20% of the data. Every doctor’s office has a way to get patient records, and this is a way to make that easier

**7) Upside for the Patient?**

It helps answer questions like

\-How does the disease progress?

\-How does it look different for different groups?

\-How does treated by a doctor vs. a specialist impact?

**8) Problems ahead?**

I think our biggest limitation is the reality of the state of medical data in the U.S. and the fragmentation of the health care system. Interpreting the data is easy Getting hold of the data is hard

If you enjoyed this then maybe I can tempt you with my twitter page [/\_\_JosephWilk](https://twitter.com/__JosephWilk) for more health tech insights.