By James Thalman

Deseret News

SOUTH JORDAN — Amy Rees Anderson isn't easily daunted. There's good reason associates have dubbed the Mediconnect chief executive "Wonder Woman."

But the high-powered, higher-energy entrepreneur admits that dragging U.S. medical record-keeping into the digital age can feel something like trying to waterski behind the USS Nimitz.

"Given the size and the inertia of the system and the oceans of data and medical records it produces, it's no wonder care providers, let alone individual consumers (or) patients, tend to feel overwhelmingly intimidated by it," Rees Anderson said Thursday after returning from yet another awards luncheon recognizing her company's nearly 1,000 percent per year growth in business.

Rees Anderson is quick to credit being in the right place at the right time more than her widely known zeal for and expertise in what amounts to the catacombs of the U.S. medicine-patient records.

"It's seen as boring and tedious, but the fact is, medicine comes down to what's on a person's record," she said. "What you are is what it says you are. What's amazing is we're just beginning to realize that the one individual in the system who knows the least about what's going on is the consumer."

Rees Anderson is using her company's patented methods for data management and record retrieval to not only include patients, but also to give them power to access, assemble, share and protect their own medical records.

"No one likes to feel intimidated or completely in the hands of any service provider, from a mechanic to doctors," she said. "But that's exactly what we are whenever we go to the doctor. The terminology is foreign; we're probably worried that it might be bad news, so we have just put what is the most personal aspect of our lives in someone else's hands."

What insurance plan they have, how much it costs, and the changes in what it will or won't pay for are all decided by third parties.

"No wonder we think health care is just too intimidating," Rees Anderson said. "We've never been given a role in it other than being told to exercise and eat right and hope for the best."

Improving or really reforming health care, despite all the controversy over government's involvement in it, will come down to individuals everywhere taking ownership over their own health, not by telling the doctor what to do or bringing some tidbit found on Google, she said.

Getting personally engaged in their care, probably for the first time, is vital.

The first step, Rees Anderson is convinced, is to empower individual consumers, or patients, to start by giving them ownership of the information found on their medical records.

MediConnect is a pretty good first foothold: It has pooled more than 6 million medical documents — the largest repository of medical information that is accessible through its patented retrieval and delivery process, all according to federal medical privacy standards.

"The whole system is moving this way because it helps health care organizations turn inefficient, disconnected, tedious record tracking to be more centralized and Web-based, which in turn makes the system far more transparent to the actual users and tracking patients much cheaper," she said.

The system side of the digital upgrade will continue to advance at its lumbering pace and probably won't really be fully at its digitized sharing capacity "until the kids who seem to be being born with cell phones in their hands these days are working physicians," Rees Anderson said.

"There's no real financial incentive for doctors to make the upgrades now," she said.

What Rees Anderson is calling myMediConnect is available now to individuals and will be as easy to carry around as a set of car keys. In addition to having easy access to a summary of their entire health picture, myMediConnect members can maintain medical records of all doctor visits, connect more easily with physicians, save money on medications, track progress toward personal fitness goals and become better educated about health care issues.

"I truly believe that the reason Americans tend to avoid being more involved in their own health care is they have been taught it's too complicated and beyond their understanding," Rees Anderson said. "By giving them the capability of tracking their own history in their own hands, they will feel at least some control over the course of their health care. And the more control they have over their health care, the more likely they are to become much more engaged in it day to day."