How to Set Up a Family Health Journal

Ahh, adulting. 😉 Sometimes Bjorn and I just have to pause and laugh about the things we find ourselves talking about on a daily basis. Post-college, married life is full of “adulting” tasks! Discussing our investments is common. Or talking about laundry, or taking out the trash, or mail, or car maintenance…

Handling doctor’s appointments is another aspect of adult life that isn’t particularly glamorous but sure is important! You may have seen the caption go by on my Instagram account last weekend, but a dumb allergic eye reaction (at least it wasn’t an infection) left me with a doctor’s visit, wearing glasses for days (ick), and fresh motivation to intentionally keep track of our family health records!

Bjorn and I are generally really healthy people, so we don’t get to the doctor much at all – something we’re grateful for! However, as we’ve established ourselves as a married couple, and as I look ahead at times when there’ll be little ones running around…tracking our health records starts to look even more important!

Here’s how I set up our family health journal:

First, I bought a binder and binder tabs. I also gathered looseleaf paper (pre-punched).

I created a little coversheet for the binder, for fun but also for labeling purposes. 🙂

I labeled the tabs “GP Visits” (General Practitioner), “Eye Health,” “Dentist/Teeth,” and “Specialists.” There’s an extra tab, though, so I can use that label if I think of another category we need.

I then filled each section of the binder with some sheets of the looseleaf paper.

Maintaining and updating the family health journal:

To actually keep and maintain this health journal, I know I’ll need subsections within each category for both Bjorn and myself. (I like the binder/looseleaf paper idea because it allows this health journal to be expandable and accommodate more family members in the future.)

Since I wanted to start this health journal with an entry for myself (the recent eye issue), I labeled the top of the paper with my name. I will label a separate sheet of paper with Bjorn’s name for his entries, so I don’t mix up our entries within each category. I continued by adding the date of my doctor’s visit and I penned a paragraph describing symptoms, what the doctor diagnosed, and what was prescribed. I also wrote how the prescription helped.

Then, I took a highlighter and highlighted just a few of the key phrases (the diagnosis and the name of the prescribed medicine). The reason for this is because I can easily scan past entries if I ever have similar symptoms in the future. That’ll help in future conversations with doctor’s about my history, or what medications worked well or didn’t work well before.

This process may seem really detailed, but it only took me a couple minutes to complete my little entry and now we’ve got a handy, easy-to-maintain system!

Was this little tutorial helpful to you? How do you like to keep track of doctor’s visits for yourself or your family?