Initiative aims to ease sharing of health history

A new initiative is designed to enable your patients to more easily share their family health histories with you, so that you can make well-informed treatment decisions.

The U.S. Surgeon General's office is enhancing and expanding its My Family Health Portrait project, a free, Internet-based resource, through a collaboration with Microsoft's online HealthVault service.

My Family Health Portrait already allows patients to record their family health histories. Now, they will be able to integrate the information stored in their profiles into personal HealthVault accounts. My Family Health Portrait is designed to automatically assemble the information into a medically useful format, which will have to ability to be shared with healthcare practitioners, family members, and services that connect to HealthVault.

"This announcement is an important advancement in primary care and disease prevention by making family health history data available and accessible to consumers and practitioners," said Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, MD.

My Family Health Portrait is hosted by the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health.