Keenan: Check your medical records as easily as your bank balance

In what year was your appendix removed? Are your vaccinations up to date? What was the name of this psoriasis medicine that the doctor gave you last year? The answers to all of these questions will soon be at your fingertips, via a new portal from Alberta Health Services (AHS), called MyHealthRecords. It will be very convenient but can also cause unnecessary worries.

Once you have registered, you will be able to view a subset of health data stored on Netcare, the secure system used by Alberta health professionals. For the most part, you will see what the experts think they can handle, such as laboratory tests and routine vaccinations, as well as procedures such as previous surgeries. With this system, you will probably not get life-changing results, such as a cancer diagnosis or HIV test. These will always require a discussion with your doctor.

The "Internet hunt" has raised some concerns: patients are looking for conditions they may eventually encounter and come to the doctor's office with a stack of impressions. The conversation goes in the direction of "Doc, my liver enzyme ALT is outside the normal range, I think I have hepatitis". Some doctors worry that this new access means that they will soon spend even more time rebaduring people that they are not about expiring from an imaginary illness.

In its web page for health professionals, AHS states that "concerns that such access would lead to additional workloads generally do not materialize and do not persist. In fact, easy access to laboratory test results can reduce the frequency of telephone follow-ups and visits. They also plan to create links to help you interpret the test results and provide a phone number to a public health nurse. BEFORE CHRIST. and Ontario have been accessing laboratory test results for a number of years and the sky has not fallen.

This is a good place to remind you that the Internet is full of crazy content, including false information, deliberately or inadvertently, or commercial bias. This is the subject of a recent article entitled "Disseminating False and Biased Information About Prostate Cancer on YouTube".

NYU Langone School of Medicine researchers led by Stacy Loeb watched the first 150 videos that appeared on the YouTube search for "Prostate Cancer Screening" and "Prostate Cancer Treatment" and did not include any of the first two. have not been impressed. "A total of 115 videos (77%) contained potentially badly-informed and / or skewed content in the video section or comments," they wrote, "with a total reach of more than 6 million viewers".

Do not forget that your body is much more complex and valuable than your car. So, while YouTuber told me that the WD-40 was a good way to get some paint on the bumper of my car, others explained why it was probably a terrible idea. You can get a new bumper, but probably not a new liver.

In an editorial of European Urology, Benedito Carneiro and Don S. Dizon of the Brown University School of Medicine say the Loeb study "should serve as a warning bell for all of us. Not only do patients find information about prostate cancer on the Internet, at least on YouTube, but they also seem to be interested in unreliable information (or "false information"). "

Health information is extremely sensitive. The province has therefore taken some serious safety measures when designing this new access method, which will be available on computers, smartphones and tablets.

Its use requires a MyAlberta digital ID, which you can get online. You will need your Alberta driver's license numbers or your Alberta ID card. The process is fast enough and gives you a basic account. However, to get good results, like your medical records, you need to request a verified account. To do this, you must receive a six-digit activation code by mail at your home address, just as banks send credit card PINs.

One of the most interesting features of this new system is the ability to download data from fitness monitors, as well as your own sleep and mood logs. For gadget buffs, this can mean a simple way to track and organize your various streams of data, allowing us to dive deeper into the world of "quantified self".

I am already following a few variables like my weight and my blood pressure, and it would be great to have an organized and automated way to do it. It should be noted that self-reported data will not be transferred to the official Netcare system. Therefore, if you do not measure your blood pressure well or if you think your heart rate is 350 beats per minute, it will not cause you any problems. If you choose to share this data with your doctor, he will probably be able to give you information on how to take your pulse.

Overall, it is a system whose time has come. If you can order a dinner or consult your university notes from your smartphone, you should surely get basic medical results. Hopefully, we'll be better informed about our health and our doctors will be able to spend their time giving us good advice and taking steps like removing the affected earwax, which I do not think I've ever given to a robot.

Dr. Tom Keenan is an award-winning journalist, lecturer, professor at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Environmental Design, and author of the best-selling book, Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and Confidentiality. the capitalization of intimacy.