GIMMEH

Watch the pitch here.

Your doctor is currently the only one that has access to your medical record. In most Electronic Health Record systems, this information is only stored on the PC of the doctor, instead of somewhere in the cloud.

So if you want access to this information, you’ll have to go to your doctor. But it’s not that he can give that information with you. The best he can do, is send you an email with a subset of the info. This is far from ideal. It’s not complete, it’s not structured, and it cannot be combined with other data.

The Belgium eHealth Organisation is working hard on SUMEHR (Summarised Electronic Healthcare record), which is a summary of important aspects of your health record, and they envision the people to
have access into this.

It’s already a challenge to get the summary of your EHR centralized, from a technical perspective, data ownership perspective and change management perspective. Even if there is progress, patient access to
the summary data is low on the priority list, and full data access in a portable format is even lower on that list…

So how can we build our Digital Health Twin, if we don’t have even access to our own EHR? Google and Apple are offering their Health/Fit components, which could be leveraged as a technology for your Digital Health Twin. They have a possibility to import your medical record. Unfortunately, if you have no structured data file, you won’t get far.

But there is a solution to move forward. The EHR systems offer export functionality, in a standard Belgium eHealth format, in order to transfer
your record to another doctor. With the new GDPR regulations coming in May, everybody will have the right to get access to this data, in a structured format. But of course this format is not compatible with the Apple Health or Google Fit platform.

We will build an OPEN SOURCE solution to bridge that gap, so you can take your full EHR back home with you on your next doctor’s visit.

Download a deck of our work here.

If you want to know more about this project, reach out to Emeric via ruben.bentein@merck.com.