By Kristi Turnquist
The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.)
Copyright 2006 The Oregonian
Margo Gunderson was at work, about a year and a half ago, when something scary and dramatic happened.
“I couldn’t speak,” she recalls. When emergency medical technicians arrived to take her to the hospital, they were thinking she might have had a stroke.
“But my co-worker knew what it was; he kept saying, ‘It’s her neck,’ and they kept saying, ‘We think it’s cerebral.’ ”
What actually happened was Gunderson was suffering an unforeseen aftereffect of a neck-fusion operation. “The donor bone was actually dissolving,” Gunderson says. “One of the screws holding everything together dislodged, and my cervical vertebra fell together.”
The co-worker knew about her surgery, but the EMTs wouldn’t listen. The federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, intended to safeguard patient privacy, meant the EMTs needed documentation, not a co-worker’s word, about Gunderson’s condition.
Gunderson wound up in the emergency room, and then things went from bad to worse. “They were very busy, and they mixed me up with another patient next door. The receiving physician, without looking at me, was reporting to my doctor that I was inebriated and needed time to sober up. My physician was saying, ‘I’ve treated this patient for 25 years and I’ve never known her to drink.’ ”
Gunderson recovered, but the scare prompted a brainstorm. She has worked for several years at DBS Health Information, a Portland company that handles the release of medical information to authorized health-care providers, so she approached colleagues with an idea: a USB that contains personal medical information that can be accessed by EMTs and hospital staff with the use of a password.
Gunderson’s idea led to the creation of Pack-IT. “The USB is a flash drive, weighs less than a nickel and fits on a key chain,” she says. The patient’s name and date of birth is not encrypted, but other information is. That information is accessed with a password printed on an ID card to be carried in a wallet.
The Pack-IT device and ID card, which has been on the market for about two months, costs $49.99 (for information, call 503-296-0061). It’s one of several options available for consumers, and Gunderson, 54, is just one of the people around the country stressing the importance of personal health records. The American Health Information Management Association, for example, started a campaign last year to raise awareness about maintaining and managing personal health records.
“There’s a frustration in getting the word out,” Gunderson says, adding that the need to keep health information handy is underscored by the privacy requirements of health-information law. Access to accurate, accessible health information has also been highlighted by Hurricane Katrina and the prospect of evacuations during disasters or emergencies.
The health-information association provides resources at www.myphr.com about how to access your medical records and assemble personal health records for yourself or those in your care.
“At the very minimum,” Gunderson says, “people should include name, date of birth, any chronic or acute medical conditions that you’re being treated for, insurance, next of kin, medications being taken and current dosage, allergies and an advanced directive. That’s key. If you show up at the hospital unresponsive, that’s the first thing they’ll start digging for. And if you don’t have that on file, then the hospital and the insurance company starts making decisions for you. This is about being prepared, and being in control.”
For more information, visit www.myphr.com.