Great new update to Healthframe. Version 3 is a definite improvement. I only slowly began using the app in version 2 because it's daunting to start, and given the last update time, I wasn't sure of the long-term viability of the company nor of its priority for this important application. May I say it is one of the best attempts I've seen to integrate all health information and make it accessible, tracked and available for use. Just what the medical industry needs - doctors certainly don't do this well, so its up to us to take charge of our own records. Bravo for such a great start!
Some areas for improvements/suggestions:
- the date filter for visits does not work. I tried filtering on several time periods up to 20 years, all of which should have shown some visits, but no visits showed until I selected All or manually specify a range.
- there doesn't appear to be a way to filter the visits by concern or by activity, which would be helpful. All visits are lumped together, dental with medical, eye, etc, so that its difficult sorting through which visit is important for the moment. If there were a filter by concern, or by activity, this would allow showing only the visits that are related to a specific issue, which is how I tend to use the app - when I'm doing updates on a particular issue or concern.
- on pages where there are expandable sections, it would be nice to have some graphic appear next to sections that actually have some data in them, like you do with the relationships section. Makes it easier to tell where you've put data. Of course you can always expand all sections, but a simple graphic would be a nice indicator of where you need to look and may remind me of what I've left out missing.
- the form for entering a doctor is inconsistent in allowing periods and commas, for example for Dr. John Q. Public, D.D.S. It tends to strip these special characters out. Then if you use the filter to sort by last name, DDS becomes the last name instead of the actual last name (that would be "Public" in the example above).
- the ability to add attachments is GREAT! I can put PDF files of records that I can't otherwise add to the database, so that they're still available. One issue with this capability is how it inconsistently uses the confusing field called "Documentation" which appears to be used as a description field. The words placed in the Documentation field do not consistently appear when the URL is saved.
- when entering contacts, there's no apparent way to associate a telephone number with a particular address for examples, for companies that have multiple addresses. I "cheat" and use the "Extension" field to add comments like "Elmira office" and then I name the location below "Elmira office"
- a few additional phone types would be helpful too: "After Hours", "Emergency", "Preferred", "Appointments", "Main" (instead of Work)
- another feature that would be nice is the ability to segregate types of care such as the ability to filter medical records to show only those that are related to dental records, or vision (eye) records, or medical records. Then within that capability, the ability to filter by concern or by activity along with the ability to report all (or selected) records on a particular concern. These combined capabilities would have allowed me to print records for doctors who wanted to review a medical condition of mine for a second opinion. I find when doctors see a lot of paper work, they tend not to read it. Reports that mix that include all care lumped together would be superfluous to them, and I fear, not used.
Questions:
1) are there plans to provide an iOS app that complements the software that would allow the ability to carry your medical records with you. This capability would allow for more accurate & easier data tracking as you see doctors on visits or set appointments with them. An iOS app could also then interact with the iOS calendar to set appointments from within the app. The app could also use the Health app to store/collect/report on health data. This would avoid double entry for the user. This could also allow the ability to import existing calendar appointments as visits in the app.
2) are there plans to integrate the application with Outlook on the desktop? Some of the same benefits mentioned in Q1 above become available if you do.
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- TIA for your help!
David