Too much information?

Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - 03:31 in Health & Medicine

Catherine TuckerPhoto: Allegra Boverman About five years ago, Catherine Tucker was pregnant with identical twins when she encountered a serious medical issue. Her unborn children were diagnosed with twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a dangerous condition in which one twin acquires too much blood and the other loses too much. Before the advent of new medical technologies within the last 30 years, the survival rate of twins with the syndrome was less than 10 percent.Tucker flew to Florida for specialized surgery, but found trouble getting her medical records sent there. “There was absolutely no way to get my records out of Boston in any form that was not paper,” Tucker says. Her doctors in Florida had to repeat all of her tests, she recounts, because they lacked timely access to the data.In Tucker’s case, the surgery was successful, and she now has healthy four-year-old girls, Elizabeth and Cordelia. “You can see there’s a...

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