Keeping a personal health notebook is important for a variety of reasons:
• You are in charge of making health care decisions for yourself and those in your charge. This can be an overwhelming task as multiple health providers are involved and the variety of paper and information being generated from tests, treatments, to say nothing of health insurance, is mind-boggling. The more organized you can be, keeping information centralized, the easier some decisions will be to make.
• By keeping a health notebook, you can monitor trends, and share information with members of your health care team.
• For whatever reason, your chart may not be available during an office visit with your provider. Having your information in front of you helps to reduce errors.
• If something happens, what medications and other necessary information, will be available for your family and health team. This is particularly important if several people are involved in someone’s care, such as adult children caring for an elderly parent. Having centralized health information, that all have access to, helps to simplify a complex situation.
There is a growing interest in health notebooks, particularly for parents to keep for children with special needs. We developed a Personal Health Notebook at Chronic Conditions Information Network (CCIN) and have been using it for over five years. What we found is that caregiver’s tend to keep the notebooks for their charge, but rarely do it for themselves.
Insurers, health departments, hospitals, clinics and condition specific organizations are developing health notebooks that can be downloaded from their website. There is also an increasing number of websites that offer on-line health notebooks. Below are three free examples.
Google Health has recently added a new upgrade. You can use this free site to manage your health information (keep an on-line personal health notebook); set health goals; track your progress at achieving tasks such as sleeping, diet or other personal goals; and share your health information with your provider, family. Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and President of Preventive Medicine Research Institute, blogs more about Google Health.
eCare Diary provides comprehensive information, tools and resources to help those seeking and providing long term care. A unique feature is our Care Diary, a set of online tools designed to make coordination of care and sharing of information easy amongst family members and other caregivers. eCare Diary also has a comprehensive database of nursing home and home care services, guides on long term care financing and information on important health care documents everyone should have. This website was developed by John Mills, who was the caregiver for his father, a person living with Parkinson’s Disease. Mills has spent more than 20 years working in health care.
CareRunner: Designed for caregivers who are taking care of an elderly parent or someone with a long-term illness.. Our suite of Online Tools gives you one place to manage the care of your loved one, create a community to communicate with family, keep track of appointments and even store important health and prescription information.
Wow. What a great article. I have a Care Diary on eCareDiary and use it VERY often for my mother who is 87, suffering from Parkinson's Disease and a slight case of dementia and aging in home. The Care Diary from eCareDiary is secure and private, so I use it to post blogs about my mother that only our friends and family can see (because they have the password), and sometimes, when mom is up to it, I even post video. I WANT our family to be able to participate with mom. Aging in home is not easy. Some days I feel like the work never ends. But we wanted mom with us, and like a lot of families, we were able to figure it out. The Care Diary from eCareDiary became a BIG part of our plan and our routine. Being the ONLY daughter, it sort of coerced my brothers into admitting that mom is NOT okay -- and it invited them into reality as the loving sons they are. THANK YOU Margo for this piece.
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