"Doctors are overburdened and don't have time to create a complete family medical history during a rushed health visit," says Brandon M Welch, M.Sc., founder of ItRunsInMyFamily.com and President/CEO of SGgenomics, Inc. "Our tool makes it easy for patients to create their family history report at home and send it to their healthcare professional before their next appointment."
The beta version allows users to create a five generation pedigree that adheres to standardized pedigree nomenclature used by healthcare professionals. The tool also follows American Health Information Community (AHIC) family history core dataset recommendations for health IT interoperability. The website is hosted on HIPAA compliant servers and uses 128-bit SSL encryption with extended validation. Some features have been disabled or postponed during the beta version.
"The purpose of the ItRunsInMyFamily.com beta release is to test the family health history tool in a real environment," says Lead Flash Developer Daniel Obando, BIT. "We need people to go on, use the tool, tell us what they think and report any bugs so we can fix them before the official release."
The organization will also be monitoring bandwidth and other usage statistics during the beta phase. Beta testers are encouraged to complete a website survey and report bugs through the bug reporting system.
Official release is expected in January 2009. The tool currently tracks 12 diseases including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. The company invites healthcare providers and organizations to use the site for their clientele and members.
