I notice a need for my own sake and sanity to try and understand the different terms and what they mean to me as a consumer of health services (i.e. patient).

Starting my research by reading this paper – “Medicine 2.0: Social Networking, Collaboration, Participation, Apomediation, and Openness” by Gunther Eysenbach.  Here is the abstract to start you out:

In a very significant development for eHealth, a broad adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and approaches coincides with the more recent emergence of Personal Health Application Platforms and Personally Controlled Health Records such as Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, and Dossia. “Medicine 2.0” applications, services, and tools are defined as Web-based services for health care consumers, caregivers, patients, health professionals, and biomedical researchers, that use Web 2.0 technologies and/or semantic web and virtual reality approaches to enable and facilitate specifically 1) social networking, 2) participation, 3) apomediation, 4) openness, and 5) collaboration, within and between these user groups. The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) publishes a Medicine 2.0 theme issue and sponsors a conference on “How Social Networking and Web 2.0 changes Health, Health Care, Medicine, and Biomedical Research”, to stimulate and encourage research in these five areas.

We’ll touch base later.

Our family doctor retired this past summer for personal reasons.

I know we are not alone when I say it has been terrible. Even though I was able to find a doctor for my children and myself well before our doctor retired, I am having a terrible time getting our records (now I say ‘our’, but do we really own them?). I sent in a request for transfer and heard nothing. I called the receptionist and was told I needed to pay for the transfer, so I offered to pick them up and was told that was not allowed. It is one thing when you switch doctors out of choice, but when your doctor quits … should this really be your responsibility? If they are ‘your’ records, should you not be allowed to just pick them up? These are records describing your child births, miscarriages, surgeries … who really owns them if not you?

I waited and did not receive an invoice, big mistake…a month later I called our soon-to-be retiring doctor to see where the files or the invoice were, as I had received neither. The number had been disconnected. I left messages hoping for some info but never received a response. Two weeks later I got a call from the Medical Record Storage in Toronto, asking $340 in exchange for the records of my five children (more than $400 if I wanted my own). They eventually lowered the price to $260 and all six of us to … $360. If the records had of been sent as per my request, the charge would have been $35 per record. This fee is outrageous .

Almost my whole family has had this same doctor since 1992, including my parents, my sister, her husband and their four children, and my two brothers (not to mention numerous other people from our community.

When I found my children a paediatrician, he agreed to take my sisters’ children as well, and our requests for a transfer were sent in at the exact same time. My sister was lucky enough to receive the invoice for their records and paid promptly, however the cheque was cashed and the records were still shipped to the storage company. Ridiculous. Her situation has been rectified and records forwarded for no additional fee from the storage company. She is still waiting for those records and they are being sent directly to her. Imagine that.

Our doctor is a great man and doctor and I wish him the best at whatever he has decided to do in place of his family practice. I would also like to thank him for the many years of providing a great service to our family. However, his office doors should not have been closed until each and every file transfer request was filled.

If I had been ‘allowed’ to pick up our files -what would I be doing right now? Spending an extra $360 on my children for Christmas instead of paying for something I should already own?

Tessa Sparks Omemee