Wealth in the Historical Health Care and Clinical Data

One of the most important and crucial data for an individual is his Personal Health Record Data. Analysis of your 'Historical Personal Health Records' can help the doctor do much better analysis of your health and even predict diseases by looking at your historical medical test records.

Value of personal medical records

Assuming we have complete medical records of an individual since her/his birth, how can an individual benefit?

1. No need to print papers reports and data in digital form is accessible over internet
2. Complete record of every illness, the treatment and medical reports that show how person responded to various treatment drugs available in digital format
3. Graphical representation of data can give insights about various medical parameters
4. The health data in association with other related data like Food Habit, Exercise Routines & Environment Data can give new insight to persons health
5. Historical Health Data can help get better & cheaper insurance coverage for a healthy person
6. Software can be developed to monitor your health in Real Time & give smart predictions even before you notice any visible symptoms of an health issue

Early detection & treatment of many critical illness like Cancer, Heart Disease etc can give you and your doctor a head start to tackling the disease early and improve the chances of cure. The medical tests that you have done all your life is an important personal data. If the data is stored in digital format and analyzed by a software it can give key insight to you & your doctor. Unfortunately we are not in habit of maintaining our Personal Health Record Data over the time, government does not have any laws to enforce digitization of medical records and there are no standards for data privacy and data management for health care industry in India.
                           Out health care systems are driven by commercials considerations and heath care industry does not have adequate systems to maintain personal medical history from birth on wards. Even today most hospitals only give printed reports and do no felicitate digital storage of your medical records. This means your data perishes with your paper reports and cannot be analyzed for insights from your medical health history.

Importance of analyzing personal health records in disease detection

I am speaking from my own experience on how my family faced challenge to diagnose an illness of a family member and we were not able to identify some obvious deviation in CBC medical reports (Complete Blood Count) parameters because we did not have medicals records in digital format. We kept visiting a General Practitioner doctor with paper reports and doctor possibly did not analyze change in certain parameters over months. Only when we visited a specialist we came to understand the medical data that helped us diagnose the critical illness. To give an example, when a person has Blood Cancer (aka CML) the CBC reports parameters like WBC count, Hemoglobin level & platelet count change drastically. If you compare patients CBC report it can show which of the parameters have variance of more than 10% (actual variations in parameters in case of CML can be more than 100%) and that information can help the doctor do further investigations to detect blood cancer.

Digital Data, Visualization Software & Data Analysis

As a software engineer when I reviewed the situation I realized that if we had medical records in digital format, some basic knowledge of medical parameters and a software to visualize the records it would have been quite easy to identify the parameters that are deviating from normal acceptable range and it would have been much easier for the doctor to diagnose the disease. For patient with chronic illness it is critical to keep a watch over changing health parameters even before you share the data with your doctor and a simple mobile application would help the patient to monitor his/her health.So I created a CBC Monitor and distributed the application free of cost to few cancer hospitals who have given the software to their patients for maintaining and sharing their CBC Records - a test that has to be conducted every month by a CML (Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia also called Blood Cancer) patient.

Sample mobile application screen displaying CML Report in graphical format

There are few key points to note while building a software for analyzing health record of a person

1. There are standard acceptable range of values for each medical parameter of human body
2. Every person could have unique values for the standard medical parameters that may be lower or higher than the ideal range recommended by medical standards
3. Every illness will cause some deviation in personal medical parameters over a period and this information can serve as a rule for software
4. Software User Interface Design has to be user friendly

So a software that is built considering the above the points can be customized to monitor health and change in health of each individual. With incremental propagation of mobile devices it is only logical that mobile devices are the best bet for Personal Health Monitoring Software that will empower each individual to Save, Analyze & Share his medical data on the go.  Unfortunately neither the hospitals nor the government health services in #India have focused on leveraging mobile devices to empower the patient to 'Digitize' his/her medical records. I would have expected private companies in healthcare to leverage this opportunity to provide free software and storage to the public to maintain their medical records and also use the software to build customer loyalty towards their brand. What is clearly lacking is a long term vision and intent to provide better health management for people.
         
What is required today from IT service providers is to bridge the gap between people, hospitals, insurance companies by building software that can 'Save, Analyze, Share'  healthcare data for benefits all the parties.

1. People require a free to use software for maintaining their medical records
2. Doctors, Hospitals, Labs & Insurance companies require a software that improves customer loyalty & improves customer retention. 
3. Healthcare industry in India needs software applications that helps think the Data and interpreting clinical and health data in a better way by digitizing the data and using sophisticated algorithm to predict illness or detect them in early stages.
4. To initiate the Digital in healthcare the Indian government needs to pass laws to ensure hospitals are responsible for storing patient health records and also for ensuring portability of the personal record data.
5. Government also needs to make sure that there medical governing bodies of healthcare define standards for health care data to enable health care data standardization.
6. Finally government needs to define data privacy law for health care industry and create a monitoring body to ensure  the laws are implemented by the industry.

America implemented HIPPA in 1996 and passed a law to ensure compliance by health care industry. THe law has ensured that hospitals are accountable for maintaining every American's medical records in a standard portable digital format. every citizens  India is already 23 years late in initiating standardization and implementation of Digital Health Care and we cannot delay it any further. As of the healthcare industry the companies that provides such software service will build a new segment & set the pace for next medical revolution in #India. We know Data  is Valuable and Hisporical Health Care data is even more valuable. The reason I think the data will revolutionize healthcare in India and globally is because India is worlds 2nd most populous country and we should consider this historical health care data as 'result of voluntary drug trials' because the data gives insight to how patient responds to various drugs. So will the politicians take the advice and implement the Indian HIPPA law?