Your Health Records Are Wrong
And Health AI Is Making It Worse
This is the fourth in a series on using AI for personal health.
Full Disclosure: I built HealthScout, an app to help patients navigate our complex healthcare system.
"Are you still on Vicodin?" asks an intake nurse for the umpteenth time. No, I’m not “on” Vicodin. It was prescribed after my gallbladder was removed in 2005. Why are they still asking about it 20 years later, and what does it mean for health AI?
Wrong Records Produce Wrong Answers
The healthcare industry has been working for decades on something called “the longitudinal record,” an initiative to provide access to all your health records from all your providers to you, the patient and (with your permission) your doctors. Real progress has been made, but what I found developing HealthScout is that most people’s health records are a mess: medications never marked as inactive, diagnoses that are now resolved, and typos. At some point someone typed in Rosuvastatin 5mg when in fact I’m on 40mg.
If you feed wrong information into an AI, it’s going to try to make the best sense of the information it has. So when I ask it for the history of my cholesterol numbers as compared to my statin medications, it struggles to make sense of a sudden “drop” in Rosuvastatin dosage.
Is that the AI hallucinating or just bad data?
What If You Could Just Fix the Record Yourself?
So HealthScout includes a feature called “My Added Records” that enables you to correct your health record. Now you can note when you stopped a medication or mark when a condition was resolved. Your correction takes priority over the healthcare provider records, so every answer HealthScout gives from that point forward reflects what’s true about your health today, not what was documented years ago.
No Health App Covers Every Provider. HealthScout Fixed That.
I have six healthcare providers. One of them, a specialist I see regularly, isn’t in the Apple Health network. For most health apps, that provider doesn’t exist.
This isn’t unusual. Smaller practices, independent specialists, and physical therapists often don’t participate in electronic health record networks. If any one of your providers falls into that category, a significant piece of your health story is missing.
With My Added Records, you can close that gap yourself. Securely upload whatever that provider has given you: a lab result they emailed, clinical notes from your visit, or an imaging report that came in the mail. You can even photograph a printed document or take a picture of a report on your computer screen. HealthScout reads it, incorporates it, and treats it the same as anything pulled from a connected provider.
The Stuff That Never Made It Into Any Record
Even if your healthcare provider records were complete and accurate, they would still be missing information never reported to your doctor.
Think about the last year. When did you come down with that terrible flu, January or February? When did you start taking fish oil supplements?
All those notes could be important, but none are documented in any medical record. They felt too minor to bring up to your doctor. Yet undocumented information like this can be critical if something serious pops up later.
Your doctors make decisions about your health based on the information they have. They take laborious histories to try and catch everything, but they can’t. Without a complete picture, medical professionals can’t make the best decisions. And if you ask an AI to analyze your incomplete records, it will miss things too.
But you know all of it. You lived it.
My Added Records is how you give that context to the AI. Log the gastrointestinal issue you had, your new supplements, or the exercise routine you started.
Every one of those entries becomes part of the picture HealthScout uses when you ask questions.
Patients Should Control Their Health Records
The healthcare industry is working on the serious problem of getting health records to move between systems. But if the original records are out-of-date or just plain wrong, then all these systems are synchronizing inaccurate records.
HealthScout is the only place where you can manage one complete health record that you own. And who cares more about your health than you?
HealthScout is available now on the App Store. No email required, no account. Start with one record to see how it works, or securely link your healthcare providers to get a complete picture.