The Mayo Clinic’s medical expertise combined with Microsoft Corp.’s technology results in a Web site which will store personal health and medical information of people. The site is free for the users.

The site is known as “The Mayo Clinic Health Manager.” This is one of the services for personal health records. The sites will allow users to store their medical information for future use. However these sites will not be able to offer transfer to other clinic or hospital facility and so the users will have to set up and maintain their own records.  

The Mayo Clinic Health Manager utilize Microsoft’s HealthVault system to store information-medical histories, immunization records, test results and other records from doctors’ offices and hospital as well as data from home devices.

The site is available for free to the patients. Once patients set up their accounts, they can provide access to information about their health to doctors and family members.

You can get started by answering questions about your current and past health issues, your family health history, medications, allergies etc. Based on the age of the respondents, the site recommends additional tests such as mammograms, and also more information through articles.

Users are allowed to add details of doctors, pharmacies, insurance companies and hospitals. You, as a user, can also set reminders for appointments.

Doctors at Mayo Clinic hope that the site will be able to assist people in better managing their chronic conditions e.g. diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. The site will also remind patients to perform the regular tests. By logging into the site, patients can get their reminders.

Such storing of medical information reduces cost and errors but adoption of technology is low. This year’s federal stimulus package included incentives for doctors and hospitals who adopt electronic health record system.

But privacy concerns are still there. Before you set up any account make sure to read the fine prints. According to Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, sites like the Mayo Clinic Health Manager are not covered under national laws and so no specification is available to specify cases in which health care systems can see and share patient’s personal information his consent.

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