As quality of life improves and longevity increases, chronic conditions get amplified. The increased longevity exacerbates the challenges of storing and retrieving health information, because chronic illness usually implies additional care from a more diverse group of providers, more complex payment schemes, and a more complicated data flow. Shortcomings will worsen as the pace of medical advances accelerates. Medical advances are throwing more knowledge, more techniques, more drugs, more devices into the marketplace at a rate far faster than the human mind can incorporate it. Physicians will need to know how a patient's particular medication interacts with his/her other medications and how these interact with their chronic prescriptions. At present, the only database a doctor uses is his or her head. They are effectively flying without a flight plan.

Medical advances are marching on at a frenzying pace, while development of decision support tools for health care providers languish. No decision support tools exist to identify drug interactions or assist physicians in making decisions about an ever-growing number of treatment options. There is a need to develop such a coherent database to provide personalized medical care. Also, this will provide the tools for patient empowerment. Information is a liberating tool. Informed patients, involved in decision-making will not only be aware of the problem, but more importantly, be an active participant in trying to prevent the problem. What is needed is a modern, central nervous system, i.e., a central repository that communicates information to a wide team. Efficient, standardized and interoperable IT systems, is the fundamental building block for doing business in the future. Myhealthcard system has the potential to be the appropriate technology solution, both for the present and the future.