Set up your family health history

A revamped government Web site offers a service that could help save your life.

The Associated Press reports:

It happens all the time: Filling out that clipboard at the doctor's office, you can't remember what cancer killed Aunt Sally or when Dad had his heart attack.

A good family health history is far more important than a gene test in predicting your future medical needs, but it's hugely underused. Today, the government begins offering a free new service to try to change that.
It will help people compile a family history at home, then e-mail it to relatives who can fill in the gaps and even pop it straight into doctors' computers.

It's private; users download the information to their own computers. Then they can e-mail a tree-in-progress to family members to fill in missing information.

And with a simple keystroke, relatives can "reindex" the tree so it shows the biggest risks for Cousin Bill's side of the family instead of the risks for Cousin Sue who started the project.

Finally, the tool is readable, even customizable, by many of the computer systems that doctors are using to create "electronic medical records," something Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt calls key to ushering in better quality health care.

Even if your doctor hasn't gone digital, keeping a printout of the tree's detailed information in a patient's chart still provides crucial information, such as steering someone away from gene tests they don't really need.