Healthy Visions

2/5 Most health care is delivered face to face with a highly and expensively qualified practitioner who acts as gatekeeper to any treatment we receive. If we seek advice from our GP, they will generally either prescribe medication, refer us for investigative tests or send us to a specialist consultant who will in turn assess our need for treatment. In the second programme of this Healthy Visions series, Dr Charles Alessi argues that this model of how we access and interact with our health care system will be required to undergo considerable change in the future. Not only do NHS resources need to be saved, but people are becoming increasingly knowledgeable and interested in their health and want to be more involved and in charge of their own care. In the digital age it is now becoming much easier to access and share information about health. Patients Know Best is the world's first patient controlled online medical records system and is based on the premise that patients have the right to, and are best placed