What Australians Told Us About Managing Their Own Medical Records

Bryan (left) and Anthony (right) at the SUSMI "Meet the Innovators" expo

Last week, we ran a small, informal survey of patients, carers, and healthcare professionals at an expo we were invited to. We wanted to know how people actually manage their medical records today: whether they can get hold of them, whether they know how, and whether something like Blooclu would be useful to them at all.

This wasn't a scientific study, and we're not presenting it as one. It was a small, informal survey, and the figures below should be read as a signal, not a definitive conclusion. But the pattern in the answers was consistent enough that we think it's worth sharing.

Here's what we found.

65% of the people we surveyed did not know how to request a copy of their own medical records. Not that they'd never gotten around to it. They genuinely didn't know how, or who to ask, or what the process involved. For something most people assume they're entitled to, that's a real gap between the right to access your own health information and the practical experience of actually getting it.

Every person we surveyed, 100%, said they would use an app that kept their whole health history in one place. The responses split between "definitely" and "maybe," and not one person said no. We don't take that to mean everyone is ready to sign up tomorrow. We take it to mean nobody thought the idea itself was a bad one, which is a useful thing to know.

When we asked what people wanted most, the single most requested feature, chosen by 71% of respondents, was keeping a personal log of every appointment. Not a summary written by someone else. A record, in their own hands, of what happened and when. That matches something we hear often: people don't want their data handed back to them in a format built for a healthcare professional. They want to look at their own history and make sense of it themselves.

The second most requested feature, picked by 47% of people, was general medical file storage and organisation. Somewhere to keep files, referral letters, and scans that isn't a folder of old emails, a drawer of paper, or spread across three different clinic portals nobody remembers the login for.

Of the people who had used Blooclu itself, the average likelihood to recommend it to a friend, family member, or colleague was 4.0 out of 5, and 93% rated it a 4 or 5. Feedback about the app was consistently positive, and a few people told us, without being asked, that they were surprised something like this didn't already exist.

None of this tells us we've built something perfect, and a small sample is exactly that, small. But put together, it confirms something we started Blooclu to address. Most people we spoke with don't have real access to their own health information, most of them want it, and the two features people asked for most, a personal appointment log and organised file storage, are the two things Blooclu was built around from the start.

Patients often end up feeling like bystanders in their own care, repeating the same history at every new appointment and hoping nothing important gets missed along the way. That's not a small inconvenience. A missed allergy or an overlooked past diagnosis can cause real harm. Giving people plain-language access to and ownership of their own health information is the reason we started this.

We'll keep asking people these questions as we go, because a handful of honest conversations tells us more than guessing does. If you want to see what a personal appointment log and organised medical records actually look like, you can set up a free account at blooclu.app/register.