Have you ever struggled to track down medical records from a past doctor visit? You’re not alone. “I founded PicnicHealth after managing a Crohn’s disease diagnosis. It started as a way to give patients more control navigating their own care,” said Noga Leviner, co-founder and CEO of PicnicHealth.
PicnicHealth does the hard work of tracking down medical records for patients, giving them access to their complete records, organized in one place. Users can view their whole medical history in a timeline view that includes doctor notes, imaging, lab results, medications and more. Patients can easily search for the information they need or share access with family members and doctors—which can be critical when seeing a new specialist.
“We save patients hours of work by contacting providers, collecting electronic and hard-copy records, digitizing and organizing everything into an easily-to-navigate format they can actually use,” said Leviner. By giving patients and their doctors full visibility into their medical history, PicnicHealth hopes to ensure patients get the best treatments—preventing redundant or suboptimal care.
“Every day we hear stories from patients where PicnicHealth has made a difference, whether it's catching something in a record that they weren’t aware of, avoiding unnecessary testing, or getting to a diagnosis faster because their doctor has all of the pieces to the puzzle,” said Leviner.
But Noga and her team at PicnicHealth also realized they were actually solving a much bigger problem by turning each patient’s messy, nonuniform medical records into structured data. The result not only helps patients directly but it also really moves the needle on research.
How do medical records help research? With PicnicHealth, patients can choose to contribute their data to scientific research, which helps life sciences researchers accelerate breakthroughs in care. Researchers use this anonymized “real-world data” to understand how diseases are experienced by patients and treated by clinicians in the real world, going beyond the highly controlled setting of clinical trials. The goal is to create better treatments that can ultimately improve outcomes for patients.
PicnicHealth has now helped tens of thousands of patients diagnosed with chronic or complex diseases, and most of them have actively opted-in to contribute their de-identified data to medical research. Patients can sign up in 10 minutes by providing basic info and the names of your doctors or hospitals. It’s free for anyone who volunteers to contribute their de-identified data to help research.
“Especially during the Covid era, we’ve heard from our users that they really appreciate being able to do their part for research easily from the safety of their home,” said Leviner.
Learn more and sign up for PicnicHealth at PicnicHealth.com/IBD.
