Your medical history, from cradle to grave, can now be maintained as a single record in a central cyberspace repository, accessible only upon your instructions. That's the vision of a handful of companies hoping to replace all those paper records now kept piecemeal in color-coded manila folders in doctors' offices, hospitals and clinics too numerous for anyone to recall by the time they reach middle age. ''It's all about empowering the consumer,'' says Thomas Ferguson, a physician and editor of The Ferguson Report, a newsletter covering the emerging on-line health industry. "There's a clear shift in control to the patient,'' he says, ''an entirely new concept of patient-owned and patient-controlled records that only you can allow access to.'' Continued at: http://www.usatoday.com/life/health/online/lhonl016.htm OTHER RECENT STORIES ON ONLINE HEALTH

• USA TODAY
  "How the Internet is changing medicine"
  (Special Four-Page Cover Package) July 14



• THE MEDICAL TRIBUNE
  "Medical consumers with Internet smarts are changing the doctor-patient relationship" by Sarah Albert, IN THE MEDICAL TRIBUNE, JULY 22



• NPR
  "Doctors Dot Com" -- NPR's Joanne Silberner investigates the burgeoning world of online medical advice. While there are some useful elements - like on-line support groups, there is, not surprisingly, a lot of misinformation and bad advice. (7:30 min August 14, 1999 Edition of NPR's Weekend All Things Considered



• JAMA
  Ferguson, Tom, "Digital Doctoring--Opportunities and Challenges in Electronic Patient-Physician Communication," in JAMA Vol. 280, No. 15, pp. 1361-1362 (Oct. 21, 1998)

Published in The Ferguson Report, Number 6, August 1999

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