Thanks for the kind words, tkiley! There are a number of great products out there to help people manage their medical data. But that's a big problem to tackle, and we're focused on one small piece of it—requesting medical records. In fact, our market often differs from folks who use a personal health record. Many of our users have been asked by their doctor, their insurance company, or a lawyer to gather and share their medical records and they just want help with that process.
Good question, hkiely! There are a number of great products out there to help people manage medical data—those are certainly two of them. Our focus at PatientBank right now is on just one piece of that problem: making sure people don't have to request their medical records over fax or in-person. What that means is that our market often differs from folks who use a personal health record. Many of our users have been asked by their doctor, their insurance company, or a lawyer to gather and share their medical records—sometimes even from just one specialist or hospital—and they want help doing so.
Great question! In the case that something happens to PatientBank or we go under, we guarantee that we'll continue to host users' medical data. It's also worth noting that we already make it really easy to export your medical records from PatientBank.
Awesome—excited to hear it! We have 5-6 different ways hospitals can respond to PatientBank orders for medical records right now. These range from fax or even snail mail to automated integrations—we do whatever it takes to help the hospitals comply. For the first few orders, some hospitals are slow to respond or skeptical, but we start seeing a significant behavior shift after 10-20 orders. You can check out hospitals' performance stats here: https://www.patientbank.us/stats/about.
Great questions! So while the way a user orders medical records on PatientBank is the same across all U.S. hospitals, we have 5-6 different ways hospitals can fulfill those orders. These vary from fax or even snail mail to integrations. We actually opened up a lot of our performance data from hospitals here, if you're interested: https://www.patientbank.us/stats/about!
We certainly plan to integrate more directly with EMRs in the future, but at the moment we just go through hospitals' medical records departments. We have 5-6 different ways hospitals can respond to our requests.
What we've optimized for is simplicity—while our process for getting medical records from hospital A may var from our process with hospital B, we abstract all of that away and make the ordering process the same for all U.S. hospitals.
We make it really easy to request medical records, but we also verify requesters' identity before allowing them to view medical records we collect. We actually use an awesome YC company called BlockScore to handle a lot of that (https://blockscore.com/)!
Hi all—this is Paul, I'm a co-founder at PatientBank. We gather medical records online. Feel free to send any questions, comments, or feedback my way. My co-founders and I will be around ready to answer!