Histories are gathered through verbal physician-patient interview. This crucial historical inquiry is time consuming and costly. Time is money. When a doctor or health professional spends time asking questions to learn about a person, it can be very expensive while reducing the time allowed for expanded discussion with a person and attending to interventions for care. Much can be missed and omitted.

When you can collect your own histories with HiGS, you can have information readily available for travel, crisis, and during times of need. You can be prepared for anything – bird flu, pandemics, infections, hurricanes, earth quakes, trauma, and most of all - simply learning about ways to ensure daily health.

When you share your HiGS PHH results report, doctors or nurses are also more apt to have at-a-glance type of information in a variety of areas, now limiting their time to targeted questions based upon what is already known. Comprehensive histories are the fundamental underpinnings to health and decisive information to detect risk.

The physician-patient interview is considered the key component of all healthcare. Today, time restrictions limit the scope of history gathering, making histories less comprehensive than they once were or need to be.

The physician’s inquiry is built upon medical-trained hierarchical diagnostic criteria based upon body systems. A typical query begins with, "Any trouble with your vision? How are you ears? Any trouble hearing? Are you urinating OK? Is your breathing OK? Are you short of breath? How are you muscles and joints? Do you have any pain?"

This guiding-the-patient doctor's agenda method is continued until all body systems have been covered and any problem ones are explored in more detail during an expanded interview. This style of history gathering by physician-patient interview, although well designed for diagnosing a problem being presented, is limiting since it is less likely to ‘ferret out’ information that can attend to issues or risks beyond the reason for the doctor office visit on that particular day.

Interviews tend to refer to, "Why are you here today?" This limiting, sometimes off-putting, common inquiry leads to lost opportunity for defining potential risk and capturing genetic and familial type information to enable change to occur for preserving health and keeping suffering and costs down.

Doctors and other health professionals use genograms. A genogram is a graphic illustrated multigenerational summary depiction of family members and their relationships to each other. The genogram includes patterns of behavior such as medical problems, alcoholism, drug addiction, abuse, neglect, other mental health issues; as well as deaths, marriages, divorces, siblings, children, and the like. Collecting a genogram is mostly limited to the first time a person sees a new doctor and familial relationships updating.

Currently, histories are mostly gathered verbally during physician-patient interview and the patient rarely has access to his or her own histories. Histories are most often collected in doctor offices, clinics, and upon admission or at the beside in hospitals. Institutions guard these histories and are reluctant to share them without the patients' 'jumping through hoops' or even paying for them to have access to them.

Relatively useless redundant questions are frequently asked in the institutional required forms to be filled out. Snippets of histories are scattershot and everywhere. As good as technology is, comprehensive history collection and availability falls short. HiGS helps.

Medical mechanisms consist of all aspects of healthcare. They are the hospitals, doctor offices, clinics, pharmacies, doctors, nurses, home healthcare professionals, elder care facilities, insurance companies, and more. Computers are installed to help physicians, nurses, and health professionals to provide healthcare to people.

Until now, what has been missing is a way for the individuals who receive the healthcare to start their own health process and history gathering. Healthcare chiefly diagnoses and treats diseases. Probably misnamed, healthcare is really more about disease care. It primarily looks after us after we become sick. Involved with preventive self-care through personal health history knowledge, HiGS can help.