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Best option at present is a hybrid solution where your full health record is kept at home on your PC, and an abbreviated record with only the essential items are stored online (eg Google Health).
Needs three steps:
1) Preparation of the master records / home PC
2) Preparation of the records that are to be hosted online
3) Arranging access to the archives referenced in (1) and (2) for third parties.
I'll address (1) first, and assume you want resilience and privacy of your records:
If that was me, I would have two 750gb hard disks running through a cheap RAID controller (it may already be on your PC motherboard, then you don't have to buy a separate card) and I would format those as RAID 1 (plain mirror, one drive is an automatic backup of the other which means your total storage is 750gb). You'll have to set that up according to the instructions that came with your RAID controller. From this point on, those two drives show up as a single drive on your PC.
You then make new partitions on that drive according to how many family members you want to store records for. (On Windows XP you use the Disk Management tool in the Computer Management application accessible by the control panel). Lets say it is you, your wife and one kid. That's three partitions, which means you each get a 250gb partition. You then quick format those partitions in the Disk Management tool.
Once that is done, download Truecrypt (which is free and available for Mac and PC) and encrypt those partitions one at a time from within the Truecrypt application. It requires you to pick a password before it 'formats' the partition. I recommend each family member chooses their own password. Formatiing can take a while. I recently timed an external USB drive (400gb) and the Truecrypt conversion of that drive (as a single partition) took 2 hours. Probably on internal SATA drives this will be faster. From that moment on, those three partitions will retain their original drive letters in Windows, but if they aren't mounted with Truecrypt they appear as unformatted partitions. Make sure everybody understands this and does not try to format them in Windows!
Truecrypt has an auto mount button, which means it looks for partitions and entire devices that have been encrypted and prompts you for a password before mounting them. I have mine set up so that all my partitions mount with one password because I am the only user of this PC. When you use yours, you will only know one of the passwords so the right partition will mount automatically and it will show up as a new logical drive in the operating system. When you go to My Computer you'll see the original three 'unformatted' partitions or disks that Windows has detected and one other virtual drive that is your unlocked partition.
From this point on, you can transfer your records onto that partition. I would start with very basic folders on there such as MD notes, operations, diagnostics, immunisations etc. I wouldn't be too fussy about the format of the files at first because the aim is just to get them onto the PC in one place. For example you could end up scanning some MD letters using your own scanner at home, and that could be stored as a compressed LZW TIF image in the MD folder. Or if you don't mind lossy compression you can go for jpeg.
You might have a CD of the last CT scan you had at a clinic. That should be in DICOM format with its own viewer on the CD. Make sure they don't give you jpegs only! For these DICOM files you want to copy contents of the CD exactly as presented, to the root of an individual folder within the Diagnostics folder on your partition. You can't place multiple DICOM studies from different sources in one folder. Also you may want to write that study back to another CD (if you lose the orginal) and you'll need to retain the original file structure or they might not be able to import that onto their PACS system in radiology.
Things like immunisations can be stored in an Excel spreadsheet. That's what I intend to do with mine, because you can set up the cels so that they change colour on a predetermined date and that can be a reminder that a shot is out of date or a booster is needed.
Next section I'll post later...(anyone can PM me if they want help with this first part)
Last edited by Odd Job; 12-13-2009 at 06:37.
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