Cover Your health records may be digital, but that doesn’t mean every doctor you see can access the same information—or know what another provider has already done (Photo: Towfiqu Barbhuiya/Unsplash)
Your health records may be digital, but that doesn’t mean every doctor you see can access the same information—or know what another provider has already done (Photo: Towfiqu Barbhuiya/Unsplash)
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As personalised healthcare generates more data, your health records can end up scattered across clinics, specialists and platforms. What happens when no one sees the whole picture
Picture the itinerary of a fairly ordinary health-conscious year. An annual screening at one hospital. A cardiologist across town. An MRI at an independent imaging centre, because the wait was shorter. A dermatologist with her own medication list. A longevity clinic holding several years of blood work. A genetic testing service with a data set of its own—and, quietly, a smartwatch logging every heartbeat and hour of sleep.
Every one of these records concerns the same person. That does not mean they add up to one medical record.
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It is an old problem wearing new clothes. Healthcare has always been divided among hospitals, specialists and laboratories; what personalised and preventive medicine add is volume—repeated biomarkers, scans, genomic data, wearable measurements, accumulating over years rather than appearing once. A 2026 Nature Reviews Genetics review on combining health records with genomic data describes exactly this difficulty: information high in dimensionality and noise, collected at irregular intervals, from sources never designed to speak to one another.
Medicine has become remarkably good at collecting information about an individual. Health systems are still working out how to make sure that information follows them.
Your medical record may not be one record
Most hospitals and clinics now keep electronic records, which creates the reasonable but mistaken impression that a doctor can simply summon a patient’s entire medical history with a few keystrokes.
Electronic, it turns out, does not automatically mean connected. Healthcare systems run on different software and standards, and even where information can technically move between them, one provider may receive only a fragment of another’s record—some structured data a computer can read, some a scanned PDF or a handwritten note. An imaging report may travel, but the scan itself may stay put.
The term for systems that can exchange and actually use each other’s information is interoperability, and it remains notably elusive. A major OECD review published in July 2026 called it longstanding but still underachieved, arguing the real obstacle runs through standards, data quality, governance, trust, and whether clinicians actually use the information in front of them—worth an estimated 2.7 per cent to 6.6 per cent of health expenditure annually if closed. Hong Kong’s eHealth system—a government platform built to let hospitals and clinics across the territory share patient records—illustrates the point well: its shared record can hold diagnoses, medications and referrals, yet the government is candid a citizen’s record may still be incomplete, since providers who haven’t joined, information outside its scope, or data withheld without consent can all leave gaps.
A 2026 US study gives a sense of scale. Researchers working with the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us programme queried the country’s largest health information network for records on more than 78,000 participants; the exchange alone returned data on more than 48,000 people, nearly 17,000 of whom had no prior record in the programme at all. This was a research database rather than routine clinical care, but the point remains: an apparently extensive record can still be missing a lot.
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What gets lost between clinics
Above As healthcare becomes more connected and personalized, keeping track of where your medical information lives is increasingly important (Photo: Towfiqu Barbhuiya/Unsplash)
As healthcare becomes more connected and personalized, keeping track of where your medical information lives is increasingly important (Photo: Towfiqu Barbhuiya/Unsplash)
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More often, the problems are subtle, found in small gaps that accumulate. A new doctor may not know a scan was done six months ago. A medication prescribed by one specialist may never make it onto another’s list. A laboratory value taken annually may sit in three different systems, making a five-year trend far harder to see—which matters most in preventive care, where the trend often tells you more than any single reading.
Medication history is a particularly sharp pressure point. Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Administration built its MediCloud system largely because patients routinely move between hospitals and doctors, leaving medical histories and medication profiles scattered across institutions—a gap that, left unaddressed, invites overlapping prescriptions and duplicated tests.
The underlying issue is not really the number of doctors involved; someone managing several conditions may reasonably need several specialists. A 2026 umbrella review drawing on dozens of qualitative studies on people with multiple long-term conditions found the same problems recurring across patients, carers and clinicians alike: failures in continuity, coordination, and accountability when a patient moves between parts of the system.
Having five doctors, in other words, doesn’t automatically mean fragmented care. The trouble begins when those five doctors are each working from a partial history, with no reliable way of comparing notes.
Why the same test gets ordered again
Repeat testing is one of the more visible consequences of fragmented records—and one of the easiest to misread. In a 2025 survey of emergency and inpatient clinicians across eight hospital systems in metropolitan Atlanta, 89.2 per cent of respondents said they had ordered a duplicate diagnostic test in the previous month simply because they could not access an existing result. Even among clinicians who used the local health information exchange daily, nearly one in ten reported doing so daily or more often.
That’s a really striking number, but it may not mean nine in ten doctors are testing patients unnecessarily—it was a self-reported survey in one region, and sometimes there are legitimate reasons to repeat a test: an old result, an abnormal finding needing confirmation, a condition that has genuinely changed. So rather than asking “why are you testing me again?”, it helps to ask something more specific: Does this test need repeating because you need a new measurement—or because my previous result simply isn’t available to you here?
Evidence from Singapore suggests fixing the underlying plumbing makes a measurable difference. A 2025 study followed 25,404 specialist referrals from six primary care providers as their records were integrated with specialist care: average waiting time fell by an estimated 16.5 days, while radiography, procedures and overall bills also declined, without any significant change in medical outcomes. However, not every category of testing fell, a reminder that connected records reduce unnecessary repetition without eliminating it entirely.
Singapore is now trying to close more of these gaps by law. Its Health Information Act enshrines a policy the Ministry of Health describes as “One Patient, One Health Summary, One Care Journey”—one health summary, notably, rather than one exhaustive archive of everything that has ever happened to you.
Connecting everything does not solve everything
Suppose, for a moment, that every one of your clinics could exchange records tomorrow, seamlessly, with no gaps at all. There would still be a problem left standing: someone has to find what matters.
A medical record can run to years of blood tests, imaging, prescriptions and clinical notes; add genomic and wearable data, and completeness starts to resemble its own kind of clutter. This is precisely why interoperability standards such as FHIR—Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources—are useful without being magical. They give disparate systems a shared grammar for exchanging information; what they cannot do is tell a clinician whether an old medication is still being taken, or which of two hundred lab results actually matters today.
As personalised medicine expands, this distinction sharpens. The Nature Reviews Genetics review cited earlier describes serious efforts to combine longitudinal records with genomic and multi-omic data for clinical decision-making—appealing in principle, since more dimensions of a person’s biology could yield a more individual picture of health. But that data has to be standardised, integrated and interpreted before it becomes useful, and none of those steps happens automatically. The next real challenge in personalised medicine may have less to do with collecting one more measurement than with making sensible use of what’s already on file.
What about privacy?
Making health information easier to share creates a second, quieter tension: the same portability that helps a doctor locate an old scan or medication list also requires someone to decide, carefully, who else gets to see it.
There is no tidy rule here—scattered records aren’t inherently safer, nor is a shared system inherently more exposed. A 2026 review in the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science notes that health information is now generated and analysed across an ever-widening set of settings, raising privacy questions at every stage of its life, not merely at collection. Protections include access controls, careful auditing, and techniques that let organisations analyse information without pooling the raw data in one place—each trading a little usefulness for a little more protection.
Well-designed shared systems manage this by controlling access rather than flinging open a universal file. Singaporean patients will be able to monitor exactly who has accessed their National Electronic Health Record via the HealthHub app, with access for employment or insurance underwriting generally prohibited outright; Hong Kong grants different access rights by clinical role and notifies patients when their record is viewed. For most patients, what matters in practice is not whether their health information is online, but who can see which parts of it, for what purpose—and whether they would know if someone had.
Who has the whole picture?
Above The more providers involved in your care, the more important it becomes that each one can see the information relevant to the decisions they make (Photo: Vitality Garieve/Unsplash)
The more providers involved in your care, the more important it becomes that each one can see the information relevant to the decisions they make (Photo: Vitality Garieve/Unsplash)
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While technology can make records available, it cannot, on its own, guarantee that anyone is responsible for assembling them into one coherent account of your health. Sometimes that role falls naturally to a primary care doctor acting as coordinator across specialties; often enough, though, nobody has been explicitly handed the job.
There are limits to what a patient should reasonably be expected to do about this—keeping a useful personal record is not the same as becoming one’s own medical-records department. But for anyone seeing several providers, knowing roughly where the important information lives makes a genuine difference: a concise, current account of medications, allergies, major diagnoses and key laboratory trends is worth far more than an indiscriminate archive of everything ever generated.
A handful of questions can surface the gaps quickly before seeing a new doctor:
- Can you access the records from my other provider?
- Can you see the original scan, or only the report on it?
- Will today’s results be available to my other doctors?
- Who, exactly, is keeping my medication list current?
These questions matter increasingly across Asia, where health information often needs to travel between countries as well as clinics. In March 2026, the World Health Organization and its partners launched a three-year ASEAN initiative to build secure, interoperable digital health wallets, starting with vaccination records and eventually extending to broader personal health summaries—the explicit aim being to let essential information cross both providers and borders.
That direction suggests where personalised healthcare may need to head: not toward folding every fragment of data ever collected into one immense file, but toward making sure the information that matters follows the patient, is trusted the moment it arrives, and lands with someone capable of putting it into context. Medicine now has more ways than ever to measure the individual. Making those measurements add up to a coherent, complete picture of a person may be the harder task.
Kristine Fonacier is a widely published journalist and author, covering lifestyle, business, politics and travel. She was the editor in chief at the Philippine editions of Esquire and Entrepreneur, and the founding editor of Grid magazine. At Tatler, she was previously the regional editor for T-Labs, Power & Purpose and Asia’s Most Influential.
