For example, years ago I purchased a Mazda GLC (short for Great Little Car – cute marketing). My roommate had never heard of it before, but once he saw it – and he thought it was, indeed, a great little car), he kept telling me over and over and over and over how often he now saw GLCs on the road.

They’d been around for some time but he’d never "seen" them before. His roommate – me – gets one and then, whammo! GLCs are everywhere.

Same thing with personal health records now. Not that my former roommate has called me out of the blue to tell me he, too, has started putting together his own personal health record.

No, this time it’s me. PHRs have been around a long time – years – but I only recently came to know about them.

And now they are everywhere.

In fact, according to a story that appeared October 24 in the Pittsburgh Business Times (and republished online at healthdecisions.org:

We may be facing a health crisis: breast cancer, AIDS diagnosis, infertility, Parkinson’s.

A family member may just have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or lung cancer or some other serious and possibly life-threatening illness or condition.

Or we may simply want to lose some weight. Lower our cholesterol. Eat more healthy foods. Cut down on sweets. Escape from a pack-a-day habit.

Whatever it may be, all of us experience health in one form or another and we may want or need a place where we can write about it and receive support and community while we do so. Yet we may be afraid to talk or write about it in public.

That’s where the folks at MyHealthMyWorld.com come in. They’ve created MyHealthMySpace.com, a community where we all can write – anonymously and absolutely privately – and receive support about our health issues, whatever they may be. And no one need know who we are.

Anyone can sign up for a blog diary at MyHealthMySpace.com. It’s easy to do so and it’s free. (I’ll be writing more about how to do this in future posts here at HealthRecordNews.com,) Diarists can then write as often as they wish. Other MyHealthMySpace blogging diarists will be able to comment, as readers of "regular" blogs can.

What, you may well wonder, makes MyHealthMySpace different from any other blog? After all, thousands of bloggers already write about health issues they may be facing in their personal blogs.

The difference is that your blog at MyHealthMySpace will focus on your health, however you want to write it, however you want to discuss it, however you want it to appear.

Do you want advice from other MyHealthMySpace bloggers? Ask for it.

Do you just need a place where you can vent – about your health, your condition, your mother’s condition, your father’s terminal illness, your child’s autism – and not worry that your family and friends will judge you?

Or do you want your effort to improve your health, your battle with skin cancer, your journey through your mother’s dementia to be of help to others? By writing about your own experience, you can help others as they go through theirs.

Whatever you want it to be, your blog diary at MyHealthMySpace is yours to create.

Thankfully, I don’t "frequent" any hospitals right now, but I put down my HMO’s health care "campus" that’s in the town next to mine and leave it at that.

The final page asks me if I want to give anyone else "access privileges" to my PHR, which would "allow another person to view, but not edit" my information.

So I put in my husband’s name and click the "Grant Access" button and then this appears (I’ve removed private information and passwords):

I could give "read only" access to anyone – my mother, my sister, my physician. My doc would have to save the user ID and password given her to my file in her office in order to read my iHealthRecord PHR online. Something I’m not sure she’d do – after all, giving her access to my PHR is my priority, not hers – especially since she already has an "official" medical record on me in her office.

But it certainly could help my husband and/or my sister in case of emergency.

I must admit – nifty!

Dr. Lansky is a vocal advocate for all things that will make the country’s health care system "more responsive and accountable" and he’s a big proponent of personal health records. In fact, he states in the Q&A article at the PHSI’s e-newsletter that it’s "inevitable" that PHRs "will become mainstream."

He also has a terrific definition of the differences between a personal health record and an electronic health record. He says it better than I ever could, so I quote his definition in full below:

While PHRs are a terrific thing for patients, Dr. Lansky laments that consumers don’t yet use PHRs as they do online banking and other electronic tools that improve our lives today. Naturally, he has an opinion about what needs to happen:

So why should you and I care? Again, I’ll let Dr. Lansky speak for himself:

Turns out some folks in the know – folks who are privacy activists – think having an online personal health record could actually go a long way to protecting you.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) has a nifty little primer on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), with a subfocus on HIPAA’s Privacy Rule. HIPAA was enacted by Congress in 1996 to set a national standard for the electronic transfer of health data. The Clearinghouse is none too hopeful that HIPAA will "restore your confidence that sensitive medical data is a matter between you and your doctor." Instead, according to the Clearinghouse folks:

So what’s a person to do? The Clearinghouse lists several tips for ensuring your medical records remain private, including this:

At first glance ihealthrecord.com’s section on supplements looks insubstantial. The page asks you to check off some nutritional supplements, such as Pediasure (for children) or Ensure (for adults). You can also add comments about your nutritional peccadilloes or foods that don’t agree with you, so I put down that I’m "allergic" to avocado, zucchini and squash. (Let’s just say I go into gastric distress and leave it at that.)

In addition to supplements offered such as Ensure, Advera, and Glucerna there are also blank boxes where I can add some of the vitamins and other supplements I take. I fill these in and hit "save."

Then – since the page took me no time at all to complete – I click on "edit" just for the heck of it and what should appear but an additional page for each supplement I added.

For example, I filled in one of the boxes with a brief blurb that I take a half tablet of iron every five days or so. The "edit" page for this box lets me to go into a lot more detail, allowing me to answer such questions as "form" (tablet, capsule, gel, cream, etc.); "frequency" (daily, weekly, and so on); "directions" (take with food), and so on. The "edit" section also includes spots that allow me to check off if I’m currently taking this particular supplement, when I started taking it and when, if ever, I stopped taking it. I also get a big blank box for any "additional comments" I might wish to add.

I like the opportunity the record gives me to go into considerable more detail about my supplement regime. But if I hadn’t thought that the "Nutrition Support" page looked less than substantial at first and if I hadn’t then wondered if perhaps more meat was hidden behind this page’s less-than-obvious "edit" button, I probably would have left the information I first added to that section’s front page as it was. That is, sketchy. It would be nice if the page was more obvious in letting me know I could add considerable detail about the why, the how many and the how often.

But here is where I come across what to me is a huge – I mean HUGE mistake – there’s only room for one contact.

Naturally, I put down the name and phone numbers of my husband. But he’s currently in Pennsylvania while I finish up my employment here, pack up the house and close on escrow. I’ll be in Pennsylvania the week after Thanksgiving. What if something happens to me between now and then? My husband is about 3,000 miles away. Plus, what if he’s unavailable? There’s a three-hour time difference. He turns off his cell phone at night; his parents’ are hard of hearing and don’t hear phones ringing downstairs from their room (they also turn off their bedroom phone at night).

I could put down my mother. Or my father. But they live two hours away and my mom doesn’t drive at night and my dad doesn’t drive at all anymore. My sister? She’s in Arizona; I’m in California – you do the Mapquest.

So I’m right back where I started. Only room for one. Just one.

Sheesh.

Even Noah knew enough to leave space enough for two.