1-Click Family Medical History
Your family health history — automated.
Our Family History Tool lets you gather health history from relatives with just one click, and automatically compiles all information to easily share with providers.
Why Knowing Your Family’s Medical History Is Important
Knowing the details of your extended family’s medical history can be helpful to you and your care team because many conditions have a genetic component. For these conditions, if someone in your family has had the condition, you may be at higher-than-average risk of also developing the condition.
How does this information help? For one thing, the information can inform the diagnoses and treatments that your care team recommends to you. That is, the information can help them provide better-informed, higher-quality care to you. Also, you may be able to take steps to mitigate your risk of developing the condition if you know that you are at heightened risk for it.
How To Collect Your Family’s Medical History
The easiest way to collect information on your extended family’s medical history is to simply ask! And if you cannot ask a given individual directly, their closest relatives may be able to answer on their behalf.
How you ask is of course up to you. In person at family gatherings is a common approach, as are phone calls. Another method is to collect the information digitally so that your relatives don’t have to come up with answers on the spot, and can instead take their time to give you the relevant information in a more private manner.
If you do collect the information digitally, consider using a short, formal survey to be as comprehensive as possible. If you are open to this approach, you can download the Chronius Family Medical History Tool for free here.
However you collect your family’s medical history, you should aim to collect three pieces of information on each person:
Their familial relationship to you (mother, cousin, aunt, etc.)
The health conditions they have or have had in the past (including the age at which they were diagnosed and if the condition is still active)
Are they alive
Best practice is to collect as much information from as wide a swath of your family as possible. Cousins, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews, siblings, parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren… all of these should be part of your extended family medical history, if possible.
Once you have collected as much information as possible, be sure to organize it in a manner that is easy to share with your healthcare providers. (The free Chronius Family Medical History Tool does this for you automatically.)
How To Use Our Family Medical History Tool
Step 1: Create a copy of the Family Medical History Tool (and survey form)
Step 1 - Create a copy of the tool
To create your own copy of the tool (which automatically organizes the information you collect into a format that is ready to share with your healthcare providers), follow this link. A page should appear with a blue “Make a copy” button. Click that button to create your own copy of the document.
Next, rename your copy by clicking on the name of the file and naming it whatever you like.
Note that you simultaneously created both a Google Sheet (a spreadsheet where your family’s medical history data will live) as well as a Google Form (the short survey that your family members will use to input their medical history).
Step 2 - Make sure your files are easily accessible
To make it as easy as possible to find and use the Family Medical History spreadsheet and survey form when you need them, first find them in your Google Drive and “star” them (or, if you are already in the file, look for the star icon in the top left and click on it).
Now, next time you want to use these files, you can simply go to your “Starred” folder in Google Drive and they will be there.
Step 3 - Share the survey form with family members to collect their medical history
To collect your extended family members’ medical histories, open up the survey form. Look for the eyeball icon in the top right. Click on that icon and copy the URL.
This URL is what you can share with your family members. If they follow the URL to complete the survey, their data will automatically flow directly into your spreadsheet for easy viewing and organization.
Step 4 - View and share your family’s medical history data
Once you have collected medical histories from your extended family members, you will have a neatly-organized summary of all their information in the “Consolidated Family History” tab of your spreadsheet. You can print that tab out or share a copy of the tab with whomever you choose by clicking “File” —> “Download” —> “PDF” or “File” —> “Email”.
Step 2: Make it easy to access your files
Step 3: Collect responses from family members
Step 4: View and share your data
Want an even more robust tool?
The Google Sheets-based Family Medical History Tool that is linked to in the page above is helpful, but it can only go so far. To truly make the most of your data, your doctor will want that data alongside the rest of your medical history and medical records. This lets them view it in the broader context of your holistic health data.
That’s why, in addition to this Google Sheets-based Family Medical History tool, we created an even more robust tracker. And we built it right into the Chronius platform. When you use the Chronius platform, your family medical history data is seamlessly integrated alongside the rest of your medical records. With one click, you can push your data into your “Health Summary”. There, it will be part of your complete health story rather than sitting out alone in a separate app or file.
To gain access to this functionality, sign up for the Chronius platform today.