Use Your Smartphone And Never Forget Medical Information

Medical information is one category of information that you never want to be without. Information related to your treatments, to your medications and so forth needs to be accessible at all times.

Obviously, on most days, you won’t need any of this information. When you do, however, it’s likely to be a situation when not having that information accessible is going to cause a great deal of difficulty. With the right apps, your smartphone can be turned into an excellent device for storing and accessing medical information.

Pictures and Words

Unless you happen to be a genius with the written word, it can be sometimes extremely difficult to describe certain conditions to a physician. In some cases, the condition might actually subside when you go to visit your physician and you have to rely on your memory to describe the symptoms, which may not give your doctor everything they need to go on.

Some of the medical apps on the market have the capability to allow you to take pictures and add them to your medical files. If you wake up one morning with a rash, and you have no idea how it got there or what it is and it’s going to be a couple of weeks before you get to your physician to find out, you can always snap some pictures, add them to your medical file and not worry about how you’re going to describe it to your physician.

This type of information can help physicians a great deal in diagnosing conditions or, at the very least, giving you some peace of mind if something that looks bad actually looks a lot worse than it is.

Allergies

People who suffer from one allergy sometimes tend to acquire other allergies throughout their lives. For example, for people who suffer with penicillin allergies, it’s relatively common for them to develop allergies to other antibiotics as they are treated with them. Keeping track of these allergies can literally be a matter of life and death.

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What makes it difficult to keep track of allergies is that drugs oftentimes have generic and trademark names, which may make it difficult to be sure whether or not you’re allergic to a particular medication if you’ve only known it by one name and not the other.

Some of the smartphone apps on the market allow you to keep track of your allergies and, when you’re adding notes to those allergies, you can look up all of the different names for a given drug on the Internet and make certain that they are added to the list.

For example, if you were treated with the drug Duricef, looking up information and noting that you would also be allergic to the generic form, Cefadroxil, could prevent you from having a horrible allergic reaction simply by having that information available.

Multiple Family Members

Sharing information is a big part of why smartphones are popular. Families can share medical information with one another, which ensures that all of the family members are aware of any conditions that may need to be noted in the event of an emergency.

For instance, having access to somebody’s record on the app would allow another family member to get that person’s specific emergency contacts, information about their allergies, their prior treatments, any medications they are on and so forth.

For physicians treating someone in an emergency, this information can literally mean the difference between that person surviving and that person not surviving. A simple smartphone, as one can see, can be a much more powerful tool than one might guess based on a superficial look at the device.

Ben Blanchard

About the Guest Author:

Ben Blanchard is the Programming Services Manager for Acadian, the creator of the Family Medical Manager app. The Family Medical Manager app is the definitive medical record app for families and individuals.