Take note... you'll soon be able to keep your medical history in one handy app

Lisa Salmon finds a handy app that tracks your medical history.

HAVE you ever left a medical appointment and suddenly thought you didn’t understand, or can’t remember exactly what the doctor said? Or are you one of the patients whose notes have gone missing?

Health campaigner Joanna Slater is developing an app to help address these very things.

Named MyNotes Medical, it will enable people to make audio or text recordings of consultations and list treatments and medications they’ve received.

Along with co-founder Brad Meyer, she has now set up a crowdfunding site in a bid to raise money to put the finishing touches to the app, and they hope to be able to launch it later this year.

For Slater, reaching this point was triggered by personal experience: her 85-year-old mother, Kay, died in hospital in January 2008, six months after being admitted for hip surgery.

It was a deeply distressing time for Slater, who started a blog based on notes she made during Kay’s hospital stay, detailing her mother’s decline following what was meant to have been a routine operation and her frustration at not getting “straight answers” regarding her treatment (strength-in-numbers.co.uk).

She believes her mother’s death could have been prevented were it not for “inadequate care resulting from poor communication between medical staff”, and is determined to help stop communication problems or lost notes affecting other people’s treatment.

“So many medical mistakes are through lack of communication and not understanding what the doctor’s said,” she says. “There were lots of things that happened with my mum that could’ve been avoided if I’d understood more and had been more in control.

“My mum’s not here now, and I wanted to put my energy into something that would help people, so her death wasn’t in vain.”

Slater received a huge response from the public after highlighting her experiences through her blog.

“I then realised how many people are suffering through lack of notes, lack of communication, and not understanding what’s been said,” she adds. “I know myself that sometimes when I’ve been to the doctors’, I come out and think, ’What did he say, what was that medication called?’ and so on.

“A doctor will speak in medical language and the patient often doesn’t understand it. A lot of patients are frightened to ask questions too, but by recording their notes they can review them ”

MyNotes Medical will be designed to enable patients and carers to make text, video, audio and photo notes on digital devices while with a doctor, or soon after. Notes can be saved in date order to a fully secure server or PC.

Personal files are visible by logging in with an ID and password, and personal information and treatment or medication details can also be added.

www.mynotesmedical.com