Familyhistory.hhs.gov

Posted on 5 Dec, 2008

Dont think this one qualifies to be a 2.0 idea, but it got me thinking about one. On 25th November 2008, the US Surgeon General announced a major upgrade to their Family History Tool. It’s a part of the a national public health campaign, called the Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative, to encourage all American families to learn more about their family health history.

The web-based tool lets you create a complete family medical history including the closest family members and others like aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. Users can print this organized family history information and for their family doctor, save to their own computer (*htm format) or share it with other family members (and let them contribute to it too). One can save partial effort and then reload the *htm back at a later time to complete. Same goes for importing it into PHRs or electronic medical records maintained by health organizations.

Knowing a family medical history is important in screening for a great number of conditions (cardiovascular disease; type 2 diabetes; hypertension; osteoporosis; breast cancer, colorectal cancer to name a few).  The tool is a useful public awareness tool, no doubt. Perhaps it can spawn something like ancestry.com to let users collaborate and analyze this in a connected community manner. That would enable some fantastic research like manifestation of cancers across several generation and siblings or atavism in general.

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