Just this week the beauty of having a personal health record accessible to my physician hit home for me. My husband and I are in the process of moving from California to Pennsylvania. He and our daughter are living with his parents while I stay in California to see our house through the selling process.Our daughter started 4th grade August 28 and less than a week later the school nurse called my husband to say our daughter needed to have two more inoculations. (It appears Pennsylvania schools require more vaccinations than California schools.) My husband had brought our child’s vaccinations record – the ubiquitous "yellow card" – with him, but to get a Pennsylvania physician to stick our little girl twice with needles, he found out he needed to get a copy of our daughter’s medical record from our California HMO. So he called our HMO, which faxed me the "Authorization for Release and/or Disclosure of Medical Information" form. I signed it, faxed it back and then found out it would take 7-10 business days for my HMO to send it to our new pediatrician. The clerk offered to send it "expedited" (which was super of her), but it will still take at least five working days for our daughter’s medical records to get there. Meanwhile, her school’s nurse is purposely looking the other way and allowing our daughter to attend school. If the nurse were a "by the book" kind of person, our daughter would be watching The Cartoon Network on her grandparents’ wide-screen TV between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m for up to the next two weeks. Thank goodness for outlaw school nurses. But had we had an online PHR for our daughter, and had that PHR been accessible to both our HMO and the new pediatrician, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Once we’d given permission for the new doctor to look at our daughter’s records, she could have done so – possibly as soon as that very day. And our daughter would now be showing off two Power Rangers Band-Aids on her shoulder to her new classmates.