http://strom.com/awards/392.html
The
government wants your family health history, but the way they are going about
it leaves something to be desired. This Thanksgiving, as many families gather
together, the Department of Health and Human Services decided to use the
holiday as an opportunity to announce a free software tool to collect family
histories. The idea behind this effort was to educate the public about genetic
markers for particular diseases (including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes)
and to raise the awareness for early screening tools in the hopes of preventing
the spread of certain diseases.
As
someone who has inherited a pretty lousy gene pool (with cancer on both sides
of my family), this tool seems like something the Strom family should have been
all over.
It
is a notable effort, but somewhat misplaced. My problem with the tool is that
it only runs on Windows with .Net framework installed, which is too much
software to install on most of my machines and I fear on those of the average
person as well. And why should I bother installing any software, especially
some fed-based bloatware, at all? Ideally, this stuff
should be just Web-based and run inside a browser. Come on, guys, get with the
program. Do you really want to encourage more Microsoft monopoly here? Maybe we
should have gotten the DOJ rather than HHS to write this particular program.
There
are several other efforts besides the federal government at capturing this
information. A notable one is REDmedic.com, where for $35 a year you can store
this information online on their servers. While I have concerns about the
privacy of this information, it is still a better idea than what HHS is trying
to do. REDmedic is geared towards a slightly different goal – they want to help
emergency room doctors and other personnel figure out your medical history
quickly and accurately. Given how hard it was for me to complete the HHS
questionnaire when I was doing it in the relative quiet and calm over the
holiday weekend, I can't imagine trying to walk someone through even a small
part of this in the throes of a medical crisis and under the confusion of your
average ER these days.
The
more time I spent with the HHS software, though, the madder I got about how
misplaced our government's efforts are towards being a partner in my overall
wellness care. It has nothing to do with lousy software quality of the program.
If the Surgeon General was really so concerned with catching early signs of
disease across family lines, he should have spent more energy lobbying the
health-care providers to make it easier to cover these diagnostic and very
expensive tests for the very same diseases that they are recording in your
family profile.
For
those of us who have tried to get a jump on our wellness care, we have found a
very steep uphill battle to get insurance companies to pick up even a small
portion of the tab. It seems as if most insurers go out of their way to do the
opposite, and make it as difficult as possible to get these tests.
In
the meantime, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, if not taking your
family medical histories, then at least enjoying being with your family and
friends.
Entire contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
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