As a physician and mother, I long ago accepted the fact that I would be in charge of our children’s healthcare. I’m never going to be in charge of car care in our household, but I will gladly accept the task of keeping up with medical stuff.For the record, I’m their mom,not their pediatrician, and yet the question remains: what about their actual medical records? Who is in charge of keeping them organized? I know that it’s really important to have a child’s health story together in one place from the perspective of a physician trying to piece together the medical history of a new patient. As a mother, I actually know it as well.

My children are a pretty healthy bunch, but we’ve had our share of unusual diagnoses and a few emergency room visits. Throw in a specialist or two, an X-ray or a CT scan and pretty soon, information is piling up and does need organized. I can say from first hand experience, that it is a little embarrassing to ask a child “What year was the renal ultra sound or was that your brother?”

Shortly after that embarrassing moment, I got my own system in place to organize our health information! I carry a small flash drive on my key chain that contains all our family’s medical records. It’d be nice to have a cloud computer store all that information for me like Flicker stores my photographs, but there’s such hullabaloo, and probably rightly so, over patient privacy that nothing suited my needs. Nobody with common sense has yet to show me something that has children’s medical data at the center of things. Google, Microsoft…are you out there listening to my call for help? The folks at the Department of Health and Human Services seem to know that the need is there, but it remains unclear to me that someone is taking a REAL lead as companies are shuffling to get electronic medical records organized?Click on their link for some pretty useful advice, but notice that a recommendation for specific tools to use are strangely absent in the video clip that plays.

What I really want to develop is a parent-kid-doctor friendly tool that all parents could all carry on our key chain with useful information organized and ready. That tool would also store ALL a child’s medical records in one place as well. Years from now, my adult children would have access to important pieces from their childhood medical records to create a complete health story…like the date and location of that first renal ultra sound.

I’m giving away my idea to the best software developer with all the expertise to create a useable tool for parents. I’ve even roughed out the marketing plan. A computerized ‘baby book’ that you and your doctor write together over the years. First word, first steps, first DTaP… Any takers?