Build your own AI-assisted personal health record

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Build your own AI-assisted personal health record

A write-up of something I’ve been doing for a few months as a bit of an experiment. This ‘How-to’ requested by @Alan_Hassey @mike.bainbridge @nick.booth @JW148 on yesterday’s Virtual Mabel's call, but I thought - why not put in in a public place for all to use?

The idea: collect every scrap of your own medical record into one folder on your computer, then let an LLM read, organise, and find patterns in it. Everything stays on your machine.

You’ll be surprised at how astute the LLM can be when it has access to lots of facts about your history. I haven’t noticed any significant factual inaccuracies with this approach. I theorise that LLM hallucination is more likely to occur when there is an absence of factual information, and LLMs have to make up the gaps with bluff in order to please you.

What you need (one-off, ~20 min)

  1. Install VS Code

  2. Install Claude Code - install the VS Code extension from the Extensions panel (search “Claude Code”), or run the installer from that page. You will need a Claude subscription (Pro, at about £20 a month, is fine to start with).

  3. Privacy: In your Claude account, got to Settings > Privacy and switch OFF the default-on setting ‘Allow the use of your chats and coding sessions to train and improve Anthropic AI models’.

  4. Make one folder for everything, e.g. Documents/health. In VS Code: File > Open Folder and pick it. Open the Claude panel (the Claude icon in the sidebar). Claude can now read and write inside that folder, and only that folder.

The workflow

  1. Collect all your medical data. Drag in PDFs of hospital letters, discharge summaries, clinic letters, blood results, scan reports, optician prescriptions, vaccination/COVID records, occupational-health and pre-employment serology certs. Screenshots and photos of paper letters are fine too.

  2. Get the records you don’t have yet. Most of your history sits in NHS and private systems. Ask Claude to draft a Subject Access Request (UK GDPR Article 15) to each GP practice, trust, and clinic you have used. Ask for imaging studies, not just the reports. Using the Claude Browser Extension you can easily automate extraction of data even when it’s in a hideous web UI (like the NHS App)

  3. Ask Claude to organise it. It will read the PDFs, extracts the facts, and writes plain Markdown files you can read in any editor forever. A first prompt of anything like this will work:

Read every file in this folder.
Transcribe each PDF letter into a structured Markdown file next to the original.
Don't delete anything.
Then build me a current problem list, medication list, and a chronological blood-results table

  1. You decide the rules! You can go for a completely chronological record - or a Problem Oriented Record, or some hybrid approach. You can have any kinds of summary documents you want - medication lists

  2. Mine for insight. Now the record is structured, ask questions across it: “Plot my blood pressure trend”, “What immunity is actually documented vs inferred?”, “Which results have drifted over ten years?”, “What’s missing that I should chase?” This is where it stops being a filing cabinet and becomes a tool.

Hints and tips

  • Keep originals. The LLM writes a structured copy alongside each source PDF, never instead of it. Every derived fact stays traceable to its source.

  • Beware complex clinical calculators. Simple scoring tools (eg BMI) will likely be accurate. However for more complex ones, (eg QRISK2-3) I would not trust that the LLM has the ability to calculate it accurately. Web-based calculators might be something it can use via the Browser Extension. (This highlights the need for a suite of fast, LLM-friendly command-line clinical calculators, which I am working on [1] [2])

  • Backup continuously. Ideally to some kind of secure, private cloud - for example Dropbox or Google Drive, using an automatic sync tool.

  • It seems to be quite good at rare diseases. Due to the breadth of its training data, it is quite good at pointing out the possibility of a rare condition, even when experienced clinicians haven’t ‘connected the dots’. Clinicians simply can’t know about every possible rare genetic cause of a given symptom. LLMs naturally just do.

Things to try

  • Ask for a condensed list of the most important key medical facts about you - the ‘In Case Of Emergency’ wallet summary - and see how well it does.
  • Ask it to ask you questions to fill in any gaps or inconsistencies that it considers to be present.
  • Ask it for recommendations for things that need to be addressed at your next few GP consultations!

I’ve been surprised by how easy it’s been to accrue the basics of a comprehensive record, and actually what you start to realise is that even in this very rudimentary form, it’s still more comprehensive than anyone else’s medical record about you! Even your GP probably doesn’t have as complete a record, and they absolutely certainly don’t have it all at their fingertips, easy to browse, read, and search. AVTs? waste of a decent LLM.

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