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Dot Health, gives users the ability to get their medical records simple and easy.

Dot Health provides those away from home a means to accessing their medical records quickly and efficiently. It has been around as an app about a year and half.

According to Brigitte Dreger, head of partnerships for Dot Health, the app was originally coded and designed for a specific patient when the creator realized how hard it was for this person to get all their medical records together.

Based off of this realization, the creator of the app became aware of the need for a service such as Dot Health’s, which brought the project to life.

Currently in Canada, the app allows users to simply tell it who their health care provider was that they visited, while Dot Health does the rest of the heavy lifting.

According to Dreger and Dot Health’s website, Dot Health is “the easiest way to access your health information”.

The app digitally requests the information from partnered health care services across the nation and sends that information back to the user’s digital profile, making it accessible any time and place.

Dreger also explained that a person can also request information about a past visit to a hospital or clinic, as long as it fits in the seven to 10 years health care providers are required to keep your records.

Dreger said that Dot Health has the ability to streamline the process of getting information into the hands of patients and doctors alike when it comes to their medical records.

“The first time you show up at a clinic that is the first time they have any information on you. They don’t have access to any of your past data,” Dreger said. “When a patient has Dot Health, they’re able to give any new doctor their medical profile so the doctor can actually provide better care. They know what medication you’re on, what vaccinations you’ve had, what allergies you have. They are able to appropriately treat you for whatever you are coming in for.”

Recently, Dot Health worked with Shoppers Drug Mart to launch exclusively in London the access to prescriptions written out by the stores in the area.

One of the biggest target group and benefactors from the app, Dreger explained, are those living away from home such as students.

“They [students] will go to a clinic for four years [while away]. This often looks like they come to the university and there is no history on them before that point and when they leave the university there is a four year period missing from their records,” Dreger said. “A lot of students don’t have the data. With Dot Health you are able to see when you had your last tetanus shot, or when you had your last typhoid vaccine if you are going on a trip.”

Dreger also said that a lot of younger people want to be able to see a real-time record of their current health profile.

“We often find that students like to be able to link behaviours to outcomes,” Dreger said, “So a lot of young people are tracking things like their fitness or their nutrition, exercise, heart rate, even things like stress. When you have access to your health information, you can also link that to outcome. So things like what your iron levels were for example, which is quite interesting for a lot of students.”

According to Dreger, Dot Health wants more students to be able to use the app’s capabilities while away at school. The company is currently seeking out an individual to become a student ambassador for the company so that they may help make their fellow students aware of Dot Health’s benefits for their medical records.

Dreger said that any interested person can check out the job application posted on Fanshawe’s job site or check out dothealth.ca