[Discuss] Electronic Health Records (EHR) or PHR software

[Greg Rundlett (freephile)]

I want to track my health.  Having recently buried my mother I've come to
experience how broken our medical records system is.

I reviewed a list of open source healthcare software at
wikipedia<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_healthcare_software#Electronic_health_or_medical_record>
and
Andy Oram's June 2011 article on Open source personal health
record<http://strata.oreilly.com/2011/06/open-source-personal-health-re.html>
systems
trying to find a PHR that I can run on my desktop.  Unfortunately there
doesn't seem to be such an option.  The systems such as GNU Health are
"intended to run in Health Centers, to take care of the daily clinical
practice as well as to manage the health center resources."

There are some online systems.  Microsoft's Health Vault,
Google's (defunct) Google Health, and
*Dossia*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dossia> which
is a consortium of large employers.  Of note, Dossia is based on Open
source software<http://docs.dossia.org/images/5/5a/Dossia_Technical_Overview.pdf>
and
they released their API <http://docs.dossia.org/index.php/Main_Page> in
2009, so it's not a traditional tethered PHR service.  Unfortunately, the
system is only accessible to individuals who work for an employer who
participates in the program.  Their FAQ addresses the need for such a
system<http://www.dossia.org/for-employers/employer-q-and-a#q3>
.

Andy points to *Indivo <http://indivohealth.org/>* as a possibility.  It's
run by the (Boston) Children's Hospital Informatics Program.  There are
heavy-duty requirements (for an average user) to
installing<http://wiki.chip.org/indivo/index.php/HOWTO:_install_Indivo_X>
and
running an instance of the server and client programs.  I have not gotten
around to that yet.  They have been sponsoring "app" development, so it
needs to be seen how much functionality you might be able to get if you
were to maintain a server, plus a client, plus any freely-licensed apps.

Others I quickly surveyed include Tolven <http://home.tolvenhealth.com/>
 and OpenMRS <http://openmrs.org/>

But I haven't found (I guess they don't exist yet) any personal health log
software.  I've come to find out that even the "coding" of medical
procedures is not standardarized (The AMA code set is the most used in the
US - but that's the _American_ Medical Association) and not free - meaning
that they're proprietary<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_Procedural_Terminology>and
dependent on the system used.

Any suggestions on solutions?  What do you do?  I simply want to log and
record everything about my health in a way that I have access to it; I
might be able to share it; and I might be able to import data from other
systems.

Greg Rundlett