09 Jun 2022 BC’s Health Gateway: Your Personal Health Information in One Spot
In our effort to make prescription drug use safer we at the TI are constantly on the alert for what is happening in the wider BC health system.
While patients are often told to “take charge of your health” it can be difficult for many of us to do so. If you’ve seen multiple health professionals over the years, had lab tests and prescriptions, you’re likely not really sure where all that personal medical information is living.
The BC government’s online service, Health Gateway, is a one-stop shop for all of our personal health records—including the prescriptions you have received in BC, lab results, vaccinations, tests and health visits.
One person who has been heavily promoting the advantages of Health Gateway is Johnanna Trimble, who sits on the Therapeutics Initiative’s Oversight Committee. Johanna is a seniors advocate and a “patient partner” to a research team called ActionADE which is researching methods to prevent adverse drug events. Currently the gateway holds a BC patients’ complete record of medications, vaccines, lab results, health visits and Special Authority requests. Any visit paid for through MSP (but not hospital visits, or drugs prescribed in the hospital) will be found in Health Gateway.
In an interview from her home at Robert’s Creek, she told me that “Health Gateway is such a valuable medical history for citizens,” and she thinks everyone should become familiar with it, calling it an “essential memory aid” for any encounters we have with the BC health system.
She added: “everyone has the ability to put comments in their own records.” She used this feature once to record an adverse reaction to an antibiotic, hoping to prevent another such reaction in the future. In Health Gateway people can also add any visits such as chiropractors and massage therapists, which aren’t paid by MSP but are an important part of one’s health timeline.
Johanna is working with the development team to see that Health Gateway will add a dedicated section that can record one’s experience with adverse drug reactions and hospital visits. Her final thought: “There is no one single personal health record that a patient controls—except for this one!”
Christine Martin
Posted at 21:13h, 10 JuneThank you Johanna for your dedication in providing patent safety solutions to protect us all from preventable and unnecessary harms.