PicnicHealth (YC S14) Stores Your Medical Records In One Place

Great idea, but I presume there was a reason why Google Health was shut down and abandoned this space in 2013. How will PicnicHealth avoid this?

“When you’re dealing with potentially the hardest moments of your life, you don’t have to worry about these other logistical tasks and the feeling of confusion on what’s exactly going on,” Leviner said.

True, but I sat down and uploaded most of my data to Google Health when I wasn't sick, and I've been wishing for a simple replacement ever since it shut down. This is a nice-looking project but it appears to leave users with little to no input of their own into their clinical record-keeping. I also wonder (based on previous experience with obtaining my own medical records) how they intend to deal with the fees imposed by medical service providers for the collation and administrative release of the data. I paid about $100 a few years ago for the records of a brief hospital stay, which ran into hundreds of pages (much of it duplicative, and with much of the salient information being in handwritten form).

Indeed; I have a number of health records that only exist because I kept copies (and I'm lucky my copies only got a bit damp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Joplin_tornado and http://www.ancell-ent.com/1715_Rex_Ave_127B_Joplin/images/ ).

In another case, my doctor worked for a multi-doctor practice that went out of business, and it was claimed all records were lost due to "computer problems". Nothing really valuable there, but with so much chaos in the US medical systems, where I have and see lots of doctors giving up independent practice and going to work for "the man" ... well, at the very least PicnicHealth should allow a client to send them paper copies or scans of records.

Is PicnicHealth a non-profit (although it doesn't appear to be)? If not how is the market willing and able to pay for such a service? (considering that users, not institutions are charged)

> We personally make sure your doctor has updates before you get to the office.

This is huge. With all the different record systems, many of which still use physical paper, this seems like a massive expense. Unless my physicians also have to use a piece of PicnicHealth software?

edit: It looks like this works by integrating with a patient portal provided by the healthcare institution.

Hi, one of the PicnicHealth founders here. It's great that you were motivated enough to upload your data to Google Health! Unfortunately for Google Health, most people weren't as motivated as you. We believe that Personal Health Records haven't yet been successful because they require users to manually upload their data, and most people just aren't willing to do this. That's one of the reasons why we take care of collecting and organizing records for our users.

About fees, you're right: one of our users would have had to pay over $700 in fees if he had tried to get the records from just one of his hospitalizations on his own! We have relationships set up so that we avoid fees almost 100% of the time, and when we can't avoid a fee we cover that ourselves. Our job is also to sort through the mess and pull out the salient information so that you don't have to.

Founder here. We don't have a demo login up yet but it's coming soon. Stay tuned!