What Is a Personal Health Summary?
This is a one-pager that summarizes your health concerns, lists your primary healthcare providers and their contact information, your medications and emergency contacts. It’s helpful for emergency situations, sharing basic health information with new healthcare professionals or looking up your pharmacy fax number (weird I know, but people sometimes ask for it).
Tony created his one-pager to show to EMS when we were calling 911 a lot prior to his transplant. In the years since, I’ve been involved with an organization working to get all of our health information accessible through one portal – and their personal health summary one-pager has the same info!
My Hope: One day, this will all be easily accessible online. That day isn’t today. So let’s get this page done…
Create Your Personal Health Summary
Guess what? We have a template for this! You can:
- Download the Personal Health Summary doc.x version to type into yourself, or
- Download the PDF Personal Health Summary version to look at and recreate for yourself.
Pop it into Your Binder
This is one of the sheets we put in a protective sheet at the beginning of Tony’s patient binder. When you’re using your binder regularly, some of the pages can take a beating.
Next week we’ll use the information you’ve documented so far to take a look at your care networks – what they look like now and how to expand them. Let me know if/when you have a chance to use your Personal Health Summary. How did you use it? What other information would you add?
