Five years ago, I worked at Google on the Google Health team. Google Health was a Personal Health Record product. It was retired in 2012. The Google Health team wanted to find a way to use its talents with information, connecting people and technology to empower users with electronic ways of managing their own personal health records. There was as lot of healthcare and tech talent of the team, many who were very passionate about healthcare. Some of this passion came from having to go through the healthcare system themselves and handed stacks and stacks of paper. Today, five years later, we are still handed stacks of paper. It is so easy for me to go electronic with my credit card company and even my healthcare insurance company. Everything is electronic - bills, insurance claims, notices, etc. However, the medical record itself still lives in the world of paper. While working at IBM on teams that build data warehouses for hospitals, I got to see first hand the plethora of data that hospitals store on their patients. This data is stored in systems like Epic and Meditech. The major hospitals have Electronic Health Records. However, the link between those electronic health records and patients' access is still broken. There are many start-ups now trying to solve this problem.For now, I am trying various different Personal Health Record (PHR) tools. The product of choice at the moment is No More Clipboard, recommended by an IBM colleague. The user interface is not great, it is not intuitive or easy to add new medications and procedures, but is most certainly is better than nothing! The entire time I am adding my mom's medications, chemotherapy schedule and procedures, I can't help but think: "All this stuff is already in a database! Why can't I just 1) have access to them directly on the provider sign or 2) have them pushed to my profile?!"I have always been very passionate about healthcare IT, but having a personal experience with something as involved as cancer, I now truly understand the urgency and passion from some of my past colleagues.