Sunday, February 19, 2012

Electronic Medical Records: Yes or No?

So I'm perusing my March 2012 issue of BabyTalk magazine. Yes, I still take all the parenting and baby mags I can get my hands on because (1) I like to be on top of my mothering game so I pretty much go AGAINST all the advice in these mags and (2) I aspire to write articles and shorts for them someday ... honest stuff, funny stuff, useful stuff and not fluff. Although I will write fluff for enough money. Just being honest.

Anyway, there's this teeny thing about a company called Motherknows.com and for $8 per month plus $49 setup fee they "compile your child's medical history, allowing parents to tap into it 24/7."

Tap into this, you sleep-deprived mommies with too much money and too little time: Obama laid down the law and our records have to be all electronic by 2014 anyway (HITECH Act of 2009). Will your doc's records upload to Motherknows' records every time you go to the doctor or do you have to do it your dang self? What a pain if you have more than 1 kid and a job and stuff like that.

It seems to me that Motherknows.com is trying to cash in on people who don't know that their records are going to be in that form soon enough anyway. Me, I just toss vaccine and appointment info in an Excel file with a different sheet for each kid. When that gets overwhelming, I just toss stuff in a file folder called "medical" and dig through it when I need to.

So why would you pay for your kids' records to be electronic when soon enough everybody's records will be that way anyhow? For free! Well, kinda for free. I mean, your tax dollars will pay for it, but whatever. That's like free money for the government anyway. It's like my Paypal money. Ha!

Now I will sit back and wait for the company to Google themselves and find me and then comment about how great they are!

While we wait, shall we discuss banking umbilical cord blood? Yes? No? I don't do it. Did you? Would you? And let's also find out what you think about medical records going electronic! My doc's been doing it for a while now ... I miss seeing him lug around my 27-pound chart sometimes. Ah, memories.