What the company does
My Health Story communicates the unique lived experience and helps empower people living with ongoing health issues to achieve greater health outcomes.
The Current Landscape
The management of chronic health conditions is a common global problem. Approximately half of all adults are estimated to have a chronic condition.
Chronic health care needs to be tailored to the individual's experience. Understanding and influencing human behavior to encourage health- first decision-making is the most powerful tool in healthcare. But this requires more effective communication between the patient and their health team.
Current health record resources are either not trusted (Government owned) or fall short of capturing the nuances of the lived experience. They keep the patient driving their health from the back seat.
Company Birth Story
In 2007 founder My Health Story, Soula Mantalvanos was working on a design brief for a client when the fit ball she was sitting on exploded. She dropped to a concrete floor – it wasn’t this that caused her excruciating ongoing pain.
Soula had “tried a thousand things” and consulted a great amount of ‘experts’ to try and solve the issue, but for four years, the issue only got worse.
Each time Soula saw a new healthcare professional, she would have to:
Retell her story — describing her capacities before the accident, restating the injury’s impact on her daily activities, her lifestyle, and her wellbeing.
Retell her treatment journey — describing the details of the medical tests and treatments in her quest to be pain-free.
Soula found the retelling of her medical history an added trauma. The inability for Soula’s health teams to fully understand Soula’s health story was also the cause of her ongoing pain – she was misdiagnosed for 4.5 years.
“I felt I had lost my independence, I couldn’t communicate and express my personal experience and that no one understood me.”
Soula realised that the key to living with and overcoming chronic pain was to take more responsibility (where possible) for its management.
For her to do this, she needed the correct system and to trust that her personal information was in her control and would never be used for anything other than for her treatment and care.
My Health Story (founded as PainTrain – My Health Summary) initially concentrated on pain management. However, Soula realised she could expand her novel health summarising idea to help people with other chronic health conditions such as Stroke, Dementia and aged care.
The Solution
My Health Story is a fully functioning website and App that communicates the unique lived experience. It empowers the patient so they can take a more holistic approach to their care. It also works as an asset to time-poor practitioners, presenting them with an effective way to tailor care to the individual’s experience.
Patients use graphical elements to pinpoint areas of concern and describe their health issue with clickable tags and terms and an adjustable questionnaire.
The MHS interface offers a Filing Cabinet for important health related documents that can be shared with health teams and a Journey generating health timeline.
Privacy is managed by the user who can generate special keys to share their health story. And users get to see when and how often their health teams are checking in.
MHS aims to present the patient health story so it becomes a connectivity tool. The nuances and social determinates presented in the patient story become touchpoints between the patient and their health team. Ie does the patient like to garden, or make art, what was their life like prior to the issue and how can they get back there?
MHS is focused on patient centred care, excellence in health management and privacy of information.
An affiliate system is also setup to reward companies, organisations and individuals interested in encouraging patient empowerment.
MHS is rolling out its ‘phase next’ after having just rebranded and completed App development. MHS is a listed resource on the website of leading Australian researchers Pain Revolution, as well as the Stroke Foundation’s Enable Me website.
Currently, founder MHS Soula Mantalvanos, is being invited to present MHS at health conferences, GP training sessions and groups focused on visualising health.
A Customer Story
Testimonials ‘...it facilitates the patientdoctor relationship.’ — Dr Paul Grinzi Medical Educator, Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and Murray City County Coast GP Training
‘we recognise the need for innovation in this area...My Health Story is as an important step forward with international potential.’ — Dr Susan Evans, MBBS, FRANZCOG, FFPMANZCA, PhD Chair, Pelvic Pain Foundation of Australia
‘My Health Story addresses the barrier to effective care through an accessible and easy-to-use online resource that empowers patients and eases the burden of always having to retell their story' — Joletta Belton, Co-chair Global Alliance of Partners for Pain Advocacy
‘My Health Story provides a way for me to tell my story without the added trauma of having to repeat myself, or to remember important information about my complex medical situation.’ — Deb Thompson My Health Story subscriber/joined as Advisory Member
A founder quote
Until I first used MHS, I had never left a health appointment feeling so comfortable and relaxed. I knew I had not forgotten anything, I knew I had all the information I needed, I felt in control, I felt confident, I felt I was part of my life again. I was in the driver's seat. - Owner
Check It Out : https://myhealthstory.com.au/
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