Patent ID: 8121855

Claim:
A method for providing a consumer with a service to access and collect personal health records associated with the consumer in a secure and private manner, comprising: providing a phone number to the consumer through a web site, the phone number individually associated with and dedicated to the consumer for private fax and voice communications from a health care provider; associating access information with the consumer for the consumer to use to access the web site hosted on a web server using a web-enabled device; providing the consumer with a document to provide to the health care provider, the document requesting and providing authorization from the consumer to the health care provider for faxing existing personal health records of the consumer to the phone number and faxing future personal health records of the consumer to the phone number as the future personal health records are created by the health care provider; receiving a private fax communication at a fax server, the private fax communication comprising a personal health record associated with the consumer for which the consumer has requested and authorized the health care provider to send to the phone number, wherein the personal health record is from the set consisting of a patient chart, a birth certificate, a vaccination record, a medical history, a lab report, a test result, a prescription, an x-ray result or image, a scan, and an EKG result or image; converting the private fax communications into an image file format at the fax server; storing the personal health record encoded in the image file format such that the personal health record is accessible through the web site; providing the consumer with access to the web site hosted on the web server, the access provided through use of the access information and providing on the web site an interface to the personal health records of the consumer for the consumer to use to access the personal health record; providing a means of receiving a voice communications message from the health care provider to the consumer and maintaining the voice communications message as private; and alerting the consumer of the voice communications message from the health care provider and providing the consumer with access information to access the voice communications message.