How a PHR can help infertile couples to help their doctor !

Being infertile is bad enough. Often going to the doctor ends up making you even sicker !

The healthcare system today is sick , and one of the reasons for this is because it is doctor-centric. Medical care is fragmented and disorganized - and this is especially true for infertility treatment. After going to your family physician ( GP), you have to wait until he decides to refer you to a gynecologist. This can take 2-3 months in certain countries. While gynecologists are good at tackling simple problems, if, God forbid, you have a complex problem, then you get referred on to an infertility specialist. Since there aren't too many of these, you may have to wait upto 6 months to get an appointment - and if your husband has a problem, then he will have to see another specialist, called an andrologist. To make matters worse, these doctors rarely bother to communicate with each other ( forget about talking to you !), with the result that you get piecemeal attention, often on an ad hoc basis. This can be very frustrating; can waste time; and is often expensive, because tests may have to be repeated and no one ( least of all you !) seems to have a clue as to what the next step is.

In order to improve this broken system, we need to put patients at the center of it all – after all, “ patients are the largest untapped healthcare resource “ ! Patients ( and their relatives and friends) are : intelligent and capable; and because they have a lot at stake , they are motivated to get medical care and will be willing to invest time and energy if given the right tools to ensure a good outcome. We need to provide the tools directly to patients !

The key to patient-centered health care is the Patient Health Record ( PHR). The health record is the patient’s story – from the patient’s point of view . Unfortunately, for most of us, our financial records are in better shape than our health records . There are many reasons for this - and the bigget problem is ignorance. Because we cannot make sense of medical records, we often give up and do not bother to store or analyse them.

The Dr Malpani PHR helps to correct this problem ! Not only does it help you organise and store your records safely, it also educates you about infertility and helps you make sense of your problem and your treatment options.