Imagine a world

• Where getting answers to your health queries does not start from google.com
• Where your data sources for every day health information is not limited to your friends and family members
• Where you have access to real-world “hard data” and not “generic information”

There is a lot of health information available but no real and reliable, accessible and actionable health data. In today’s scenario if one had a medical query (for e.g. what is the cure for tendonitis), one would start with a google search and come across multiple websites offering basic to specific information which is disorganized, unstructured, difficult to manage and even difficult to validate. The end result of the query currently depends on the perseverance, patience and competency of the user to navigate the information generated by the query. The resulting conclusions drawn by the user is inconsistent and in most cases leaves users with more questions than answers. In all cases, users are left to the mercy of their current health service providers.

There are a number of case studies that friends and family close to us have experienced in the recent past and if we had a fully loaded myMEDistry to access, their and our health journeys would have been a bit more smoother and less nerve-wrecking.
Here is a recent experience we went through with a close family member:
A close family member who is now 33, had been perfectly healthy, married and mother of 2 wonderful, healthy children. 2 years ago she suffered cardiac arrest with symptoms of nausea and blackouts 3 times in 24 hours. Luckily for her, she had one of the episodes while under observation in the ER and the doctors noticed her heart rate dropping to 30 and so they immediately implanted a pacemaker. She has been prescribed to have this pacemaker for life now. Up until now, nobody knows the reason why her heart skipped beating at that time and why she needs a pacemaker for life. To make matters more complicated, doctors apparently don’t often see these symptoms or episodes in people of her age, gender and demographic and so do not have much idea on what to expect here onwards. Now, our quest on the world wide web has been a test in patience. There are a number of forums and support groups for people with pacemakers and other heart ailments, but it has been extremely time consuming and still impossible to find cases of patients who have had a pacemaker from such an young age and to find out what the long term side effects of having pacemaker in the body has been. The reason for this is there is lot of ‘generic’ information describing types of pacemakers, their pros and cons and ‘generic’ efficacy and reactions. For example, during the first 6 months after having the pacemaker, the doctors were monitoring how much the pacemaker was being used, the usage was ranging from 20% to 40% and we didn't know what was expected and if the range was normal or not. Different doctors opined differently and different doctors gave different care instructions. There were few ways to find other people like her whom she could connect with, but there was no structured data that could be used to put 2 and 2 together in these cases. Imagine if

• We could go to a site and find others who had a pacemaker implanted at a relatively young age and
• We could contact them to interact directly and
• We could find real data on their symptoms and side effects monitored over a period of time
• We could find real data on what the most common operating usage percentage is for pacemakers overtime

What we found in our quest is that after the initial readings, all the information on the web is too generic and hard/impossible for non-medical people like us to infer anything useful from it. There were lot of forums and blogs which described what people were going through, but it was not always complete information or structured enough for us to piece their journeys together. These were great ways to read and feel connected and feel assured that we were not alone. But the information was not something we could use effectively. Given that we were surrounded by medical professionals in our family, we were able to weed through all that we found on the web and decided finally to just give up. 

From such personal experiences was born the idea of myMEDistry, the goal of which is to help people around the globe capture their medical journeys in a structured manner to help others easily find them and more importantly use them. We believe such sharing of real world experiences makes it possible to collaborate in a global level and make breakthroughs in newer treatments possible. myMEDistry doesn’t intend to be a source of medical advice or treatment, it is a place for people to share and find others’ medical experiences that they can learn from and be better prepared in asking the right questions and be better equipped in making their healthcare decisions.

Come, join myMEDistry today and help us make a difference in global healthcare experiences.