Managing a Family's Medical Records Without an EHR
In Mexico, electronic health records mostly don’t exist outside a handful of private hospital chains. Every visit produces a paper prescription or a printed lab report, and nothing connects one to the next. If you’re the family member managing care for someone else (an aging parent, a relative with a chronic condition), that gap becomes your job: the medication list lives in your head, the lab history in a drawer somewhere, and “who prescribed what, and how do I reach them” in whatever photo you happened to take at the time. I do this for my family, coordinating specialists, prescriptions, and lab work across appointments, and it isn’t just me: we also have paid caregivers on morning and night shifts who actually give the medication, off a whiteboard that someone in the family has to keep updated by hand. Every new doctor starts from zero, and every handoff to a caregiver depends on whoever last updated that whiteboard remembering to do it. A lot of the actual care happens between visits, informally, too: a dose gets adjusted over a phone call, and the only record of it is whether someone remembers to walk over and change the board. ...