My Favorite Things: Seth Godin’s Health Summary

Not long ago, Seth Godin, blogged about “The simple form that could save your life“.  That form was a template on which you could summarize your medical history and in turn provide your health care providers with complete information on your health.

My first thought was how useful such a Health Summary would be for each of my children as they head off to college.  This one page summary could be kept in their files and provided to the campus health center if necessary.   In completing them though I realized how useful such a summary would be for each member of my family.  Because the health history section of the form calls for information from your parents and siblings, I requested they create summaries too.  As a result, my husband and I learned some important things about our parents’ and grandparents’ health histories.  Having ready access to this information will also allow us to serve as better health care advocates for each other.

The Health Summary contains basic information such as name, address, and emergency contact information, but it also includes the following:

• Health histories for your parents, grandparents and siblings
• Details of past illnesses, surgeries, chronic conditions and current medications
• Contact information for your health care providers
• Information regarding living wills, health care powers of attorney, etc.

These Health Summaries came in very handy when recently, my husband and I each had a first visit with a new Primary Care Physician.  Both the doctor and his staff were thrilled to have access to the information on this form.  The doctor made a copy of it for his records and his staff actually thanked me for making their job easier.  This doctor also made me aware of a couple of things that I might want to include on the summary such as the dates and results of recent preventative testing.

How might a Health Summary benefit you or someone you know?

For a link to Seth’s blog and the word document template of the form, click here.