My health timeline with PicnicHealth

Finally, access to all my medical records in a way that’s easy to digest!

I grew frustrated with my health care over the past year as things were starting to feel too compartmentalized across the various doctors and specialists I saw. I didn’t feel like anyone was really looking at the big picture, so last July I undertook the cumbersome task of manually transferring all my lab values over the past decade into one giant spreadsheet. (Good thing I’m a bit of a data/spreadsheet geek!) In doing so, I was hoping to identify trends and get a better understanding of my own health journey. While I was in the middle of this task, around August, the universe connected me with PicnicHealth.

In this new digital world of connecting and building relationships with complete strangers and communities through social media, I received a message in my Instagram account from a fellow chronic illness warrior telling me about PicnicHealth, their Change Champion program, and the ways in which my health data could advance research in the fields that hit closest to home for me: IgA nephropathy and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). 

I met with one of the community partnership managers and fell in love with the PicnicHealth platform. One of the most exciting things that PicnicHealth offers to patients is a unique health timeline that gives a bird’s-eye view of each patient’s medical history that is organized and searchable. 

PicnicHealth takes on the task of collecting all of your health records and data for you — from all your various hospitals, clinics, and labs — and puts them into one complete timeline. Everything from doctor’s notes and lab results to images and more are easily accessed in the health timeline. No more wondering what my doctor wrote in the chart, I can log in to my PicnicHealth account and read it for myself! I can even click on a lab value and see a chart of how that specific value has fluctuated over time.

I wasn’t sure if they would be able to get my records from the Veterans Affairs hospitals I go to for care, but they sure did! 

The other part of the PicnicHealth program that I am proud to participate in is being able to contribute to medical research. With my permission, PicnicHealth takes my digitized health data and combines it (anonymously) with the data of other people with my same conditions (IgA nephropathy and IBD). With their databases of anonymized records, PicnicHealth helps researchers spot trends and make new discoveries related to our health.

Today, I’m proud to be a PicnicHealth Change Champion, helping to spread the word about the platform and also sharing my health data (anonymously and securely) with research partners to help advance medicine. 

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