Disasters and health records

After Katrina the Society did a lot to help cancer patients recover or recreate records related to their disease. It gave impetus to discussion at the Futureing and Innovation Center about supporting a nationwide system of health records. It’s clear that some sort of health record system is badly needed for a variety of reasons.

There’s an article in Wired News about some of the problems that come up with health records after disasters. The conclusion is in this quote:

The clearest lesson…is that the health care system needs a
method for patients to make choices about what medical information will
go into a database before disaster hits.