Private Health Record
A record the patient holds and controls, rather than one held by a single clinic — with consent deciding who sees what.
Who this is for
Providers who want patients to carry their own history between clinicians, and organisations building patient-facing health apps. Distinct from a clinic's own records system, which is a Medical Information System.
What you get
- A patient-held record: history, medications, allergies, results, documents
- Consent management — who the patient has granted access to, and for how long
- Clinician access under that consent, with every access logged
- Document and image upload, from patients and from providers
- Import from provider systems where an interface exists
- Export, so a patient can take their record elsewhere
What this does not include
- Clinical interpretation of anything in the record
- Regulatory certification or data-protection sign-off
- Migration of paper records — that is a data-entry project, quoted separately
What a personal health record is
Most health records are organised around the provider: this clinic, this hospital, these episodes of care. A personal health record is organised around the person, across every provider they have ever seen — and the person decides who is allowed to look.
That inversion is the whole idea, and it is also where every difficult question comes from.
The questions that decide the design
Who owns the data? Legal, not technical, and it determines everything after it — consent, retention, export, and what happens if the service ends.
What can the patient change? Adding to your own record is uncontroversial. Editing what a clinician wrote is not. Most systems let a patient annotate and request a correction, with both visible, and that is usually right.
How is access granted and revoked? Consent that cannot be withdrawn easily is not really consent. Time-limited and scope-limited access is worth building properly.
How does data get in? Manual entry alone produces an incomplete record that nobody trusts. Interfaces to provider systems are what make it useful, and they are the hardest part.
When this is the right thing to build
- Patients move between providers and their history does not follow them.
- Care depends on information the patient holds — allergies, medications, prior results.
- You want patients genuinely able to participate in their own care rather than in principle.
When it is not
- You need a records system for your own clinic. That is a Medical Information System, and it is a different design.
- There is no route to importing real clinical data. A record populated only by hand stays incomplete, and an incomplete record is one nobody relies on.
Regulation and data protection
Personal health data is among the most heavily regulated categories anywhere, and the specifics differ by jurisdiction.
We build to the requirements you give us, and we will ask for them in writing before design. We do not offer certification or a compliance guarantee. If a supplier tells you a health record system “is compliant” without asking which jurisdiction you are in, that is worth noticing.
Export is not a feature to add later
Build the way out at the same time as the way in. A patient who cannot take their record elsewhere does not hold it in any meaningful sense — and a service that closes without export destroys the thing it asked people to trust it with.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from a clinic's patient records?
Who holds it and who controls access. A clinic's system is organised around the clinic and its episodes of care. A personal health record is organised around one person across every provider they see, and the patient decides who may look at it.
Who owns the data?
That is the first question to answer and it is a legal one, not a technical one. It determines consent, retention, export and what happens if the service closes. Get it settled in writing before anyone designs a schema.
What happens if you stop offering the service?
Export must exist from day one. A health record a patient cannot take with them is not really theirs, and building it without an exit is a decision you make on their behalf.
Can patients correct their own record?
A design decision with real consequences, and one you should make deliberately. Usually: a patient may add and annotate, and may request correction of clinical entries, but cannot silently rewrite what a clinician recorded. Both the entry and the request should be visible.
Last reviewed 2026-08-30 by Rajesh.
Talk to us about Private Health Record
Tell us the goal and we will scope it properly.