The Limits of Health Data Aggregation
1. Medical records have rampant errors.

An estimated 70 percent of medical records have errors. These may be egregious, like Abby Norman’s record incorrectly stating she has 8 sisters (she has none), or they might be small, like a name misspelling.

My own medical record has a ‘problem’ (diagnosis) that is no longer active, and honestly it’s an embarrassing thing that I’d like to have archived off of my active problem list. Every time I go to the doctor and have an ‘after-visit summary’ printed, it shows this private issue on it. I’ve tried to get it updated a few times, and I haven’t had any luck. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for patients like me to have difficulty fixing medical record mistakes.

Sometimes our medical records misrepresent us because of their inherent limitations, rather than outright errors. I recently worked with a woman who accessed her medical records from a large California hospital system. She gave me a complete list of all of her conditions, medications, allergies, etc; her medication list in particular had over 50 items on it, many of which she did not recognize or was sure she never actually took. Our medical records are good at showing when a medication was prescribed, but bad at indicating whether we took the medication or for what duration of time. In order to put together an accurate picture, we had to groom through her data manually and determine which medications she took, and fix the dates associated with them.

So, while our medical records are important repositories of our history, they’re often filled with medications we never took, diagnoses entered by accident, and conditions we no longer have. Bringing all of this information together is helpful and a good first step, but we also need a process of sifting through it to fix the errors, omissions and inconsistencies; patients should be at the center of this process.
['Katie Mccurdy']
['Healthcare', 'Health Technology', 'Patient Experience', 'Data Science', 'Healthcare Technology']