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!

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.

I stayed in California to sell the house and work, retaining the all-important health benefits.

Our California house is now in escrow and we close November 17. We came across a house we both liked during my last visit to Pennsylvania in mid-October and we made an offer. We got it and we close escrow on Pennsylvania House Nov. 27.

What does this have to do with personal health records or medical records, you may ask? Bear with me. I’ll get to that.

So forms and signatures and paperwork with Social Security numbers, bank numbers and what feels to be a bajillion forms of various identification vehicles have been crossing the country via the U.S. Post Office and the Internet.

Can you say "vulnerable to identity theft?"

And what should happen as well last week is that I received no mail for two days in a row. Not even a political piece shilling for a candidate. Nary a "specials at Albertson’s" flyer.

Let alone our checking account statement.

Which. Should. Have. Come. By. Now.

The checking account statement which in less than three weeks will carry the proceeds from the sale of our house here in California which is, basically, a huge portion of our life’s savings

We have one of those condo-like mail boxes for our development, where each house receives its mail in one of eight mail boxes housed in a larger box. The mail deliverer opens up the back of the larger box and places the mail in the appropriate slot for each address.

I checked out the back of our box and what should before my eyes appear but the back door of the box broken into and folded back a schmear.

Just enough for a hand to reach in and take mail for us and one other unlucky homeowner.

So I checked USPS.com to see what I should do about possible mail theft.

First step: "Go to your local post office and report it."

The second day of no mail was a Saturday. I got home to see no mail after 5 p.m.

So I spend Saturday night and Sunday hyperventilating. Perhaps our mail wasn’t stolen; perhaps we just didn’t receive mail for two days. It could happen, I hoped.

I also had put in our mail forwarding request to Pennsylvania House online Thursday, the day before my mail stopped waiting for me in its box. While I requested mail forwarding start Nov. 17, perhaps someone got the date wrong and started forwarding our mail Friday.

Nope.

I went to the P.O. first thing Monday. Even talked to the guy who delivers our mail. He hadn’t started forwarding our mail so chances are if we didn’t have mail for two days, someone took it.

Strangely enough, I was quite calm. At least I knew. Knew that mail should have been there and that since it wasn’t, I have no idea if it was some neighborhood kid pulling a prank or an experienced identity thief, I had things to do. Pronto.

Our mail will be held at the Post Office until the box is fixed. I’d already called my boss at work to let her know I would be late Monday to check this out. I’d spoken with my husband Saturday night – and many times since – and told him to watch his credit card statement online carefully and to notify the credit reporting agencies of possible theft. I’ve also done the same.

And as soon as I could Monday I went to my bank to close our checking accounts and open new ones. And give our escrow officer the new account routing number for the electronic transfer of our house sale proceeds.

Everything at my bank was done electronically. The manager looked up our accounts and closed them and gave us new ones. He faxed a form to my husband for his signature on our joint account. I have new, temporary checks until my new ones come.

And we were done. Accounts secure again. We can even continue using our same debit cards.

I’ve already checked my accounts online and my old accounts are gone, replaced with our shiny new ones.

Electronic banking records, I love you!

And this is where electronic health records come in, for if being able to take care of such minutiae electronically with the help of someone who has the authority and the security clearance to do so was that easy for our banking records, I can’t wait for my medical records to go online.

I slept hardly at all Saturday and Sunday. Monday night? A quite restful full eight hours, thank you for asking.

Except……

I must admit, I am worried. I hear more and more about how our health care system is going to go online and electronic with our medical records. Even our government has plans to go with online records, and is planning on having a Nationwide Health Information Network, a system that will connect all patients’ records to health care providers, insurance companies, pharmacies and laboratories electronically. The goal is to have it up and running by 2014.

But that worries me. As we’ve gone electronic and online with so much of personal information – our banking, our shopping, our Netflix preferences – I also hear more and more of breaches of online security systems.

As  one example, just this past May the records of as many as 26.5 million veterans had their names, birthdates, social security numbers, and their disability records stolen from the home of a Department of Veteran Affairs employee.

This makes me very nervous. Oh, so nervous.

The solution, of course, is better systems with better security. And the folks who provide this security will have to upgrade their systems constantly, always trying to stay ahead of the hackers and thieves who seemingly have little better to do than work to overide security and "get in."

Three gentleman in Massachusetts – two of them from Children’s Hospital in Boston and the other from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – have a nice report in the BMJ online and they say this:

Still, I’m nervous. Online systems are built by humans and can never be perfectly secure. Someone, somewhere will take it upon himself to hack in.

Or as one women, commenting on that same BMJ article, put it so well regarding the conundrum between the ease and efficacy of online records and their inherent risk to patient privacy::

I’ve seen those films too. Nervous I am. Nervous.

Since I was a child when most of them occurred I need to go back to that old standby of a personal health record – my mother.

My childhood general practitioner is no longer alive and so the voluminous health record he compiled on me from age 3 until I left my parent’s home – and their health coverage – at age 23 is no longer available to me (yet another great reason to create my own online health record).

I once saw the medical history my GP kept on me. Good golly, with 20 years of annotations on all my visits and the care he gave me, the thing looked two feet tall.

And my mother remembers most of the major things within it.

My age when I had my surgery to correct my crossed left eye. The year I sprained my wrist leaping sloppily over the horse in gymnastics. The day we discovered my penicillin allergy ("you swelled up like a blowfish"). She doesn’t remember the dates of my immunizations, but she remembers which ones I had.

The woman is my walking, talking, hugging, personal health record.

My online PHR, while it never tells me it loves me as I log out, does offer me 26 immunizations from which to select, from Anthrax to Yellow Fever, with even the Plague thrown in for good measure. There’s also a section on "combination vaccines" – the Diphitheria/Tetanus/Pertussis (DtaP), the Measles/Mumps/Rubella (MMR) and the Tetanus and Diphtheria booster (Td).

So I check off the immunizations I know I’ve had and then I call my mother, also known as Keeper of All The Important Information About My Childhood Health History.

"Mom, did I ever get the chickenpox vaccine?"

"Yes, you did."

"What about for the mumps?"

"Nope, missed that one. We were about to have you get it, but then you got the mumps. Don’t you remember? You practically chewed your inner cheeks off for some reason. Dr. Freeman couldn’t figure out why, but you told him it somehow made you feel better if you gave the sides of the inside of your mouth a quick nibble every now and then. You even said nibble. I was so proud of you at age 6 that you kn.."

"Mom! That’s OK. What about the measles vaccination. How old was I?"

"Five. Oh, and before you ask me, we found out you were allergic to penicillin – you swelled up like a blowfish; if I’d stuck you with a pin, you would have exploded – three days after your third birthday. I remember it so well because, as worried as we were about you – you were so very sick – you looked so cute. So cute. So chubby cheeked after that shot. I felt bad for thinking you looked so cute, but, well, you did. Sicker than a dog, but the cutest little thing. And as soon as you got the antidote or whatever they called it – the thing that fixed your reaction to the penicillin, you well, you ‘deflated’ quickly. And we were so happy."

That’s my mother – the human memory chip.

Like many free PHRs already online, MyHealthMyWorld.com’s will allow you to build a personal health record for yourself and family members. It will allow you to list all medications, all treatments, all diseases and diagnoses from birth to present. Everything you or someone who is caring for you would want to know and have handy in one place.

Yet MyHealthMyWorld.com’s PHR will offer users something extra. Many of us, myself included, take non-prescription supplements of one form or another. Vitamins. Herbal formulas. Compounds and mixtures. In other words, things not prescribed by your physician or necessarily purchased over the counter at your local pharmacy.

For example, currently I take vitamin E, calcium, Omega 3 fish oil, and half an iron tablet every five days, plus some other supplements. A friend I know drinks protein shakes every day to help him bulk up. Another friend swears by the black cohosh she’s taking to help combat menopause-related night sweats.

I’m building my own PHR at ihealthrecord.com and while there’s a space on the medications page to list "other" – which I suppose I could use to list my supplements – there’s no section of the record that specifically asks me to list my supplement regimen. I don’t think of my vitamins and supplements as part of my health record – our health care culture in this country never trained us to do so. So unless I was specifically asked to list my supplements, I probably wouldn’t.

In fact, I didn’t. Two weeks ago when I filled out the "list your medications" page of my ihealthrecord.com PHR, I didn’t think to list my vitamin E or fish oil capsules or any other supplement in the "other" section. After all, they aren’t "medications" in the way I’ve been raised to think of medications. It wasn’t until Geoff Purdom, Ph.D., of MyHealthMyWorld asked me to check did I even think about them.

I imagine most people wouldn’t either. Which is why being able to certainly would be a good idea.