7 sections belong in a doctor-ready summary

What belongs in a doctor-ready summary?

Longetic calls it a short readable summary of your history that you can show or hand over, and the question nobody answers is what goes inside it. The international standard for exactly this document names fourteen sections. Three are mandatory: your medications, your allergies, and your current problems. Four more are recommended, and those seven are the working answer.

The standard is the HL7 International Patient Summary. It exists because a clinician who has never met you needs a small, predictable set of facts rather than everything you have, and HL7 says so plainly: the dataset is "minimal and non-exhaustive; specialty-agnostic and condition-independent; but still clinically relevant" (HL7).

The implementation guide marks the tiers explicitly: "(R) denotes a required section (i.e. must be present in an IPS), (S) denotes a recommended section, the others are optional" (HL7 IPS implementation guide).

The three mandatory sections are the ones that change what the person in front of you does in the next five minutes. Medications decide what can safely be added and whether a number is your body or your prescription. Allergies decide what is safe to give you at all. The problem list is the frame every other result is read against. The recommended four answer questions that come up during a visit rather than questions that gate it, which is why the standard ranks them second.

Alongside those, if you live with a chronic condition, the dates of the checks your condition asks for belong in the same summary. Two things a clinician asks out loud are in neither tier: why you are here today, and what has changed since somebody last looked. Put both at the top of your own summary. MedlinePlus adds a third the standard leaves out entirely, family health history, alongside your blood type and emergency contact (MedlinePlus).

How should you write the medication list?

Longetic records medications alongside visits and lab reports, but the completeness of that list is on you, and the official guidance is unusually specific. A medication list is not just prescriptions. It includes what you buy without one, what you take as a supplement, and the things people forget because they are not swallowed.

That section is also the medication list a new clinician will ask for, and it carries the prescriber for each entry. AHRQ's health literacy toolkit tells clinics to ask for "all prescription medicines", "all over-the-counter medicines", "all vitamins, supplements, and herbal medicines", and "all topicals, liquids, injections, and inhalants" (AHRQ). The patient version asks people to bring them "in the bottles they came in and any pill boxes you use to organize them" (AHRQ).

The American Cancer Society compresses the last three into one instruction: bring "a list of all your medicines, doses, and how long ago you took them" (American Cancer Society). If your summary carries one section well, make it this one. It is mandatory in the standard, repeated in every patient-facing guide, and the only section where being incomplete is dangerous rather than merely unhelpful.

What does an allergy entry need besides the substance?

Longetic and most consumer apps let you type an allergy as a single word. The United States interoperability standard treats that as incomplete: the substance is one data element, the reaction it produced is a separate one, and how severe that reaction was is a third.

USCDI defines the class as "harmful or undesired physiological responses associated with exposure to a substance", lists Reaction as its own element, and names criticality, "an estimate of the potential clinical harm, or seriousness, of a reaction to an identified substance" (ASTP).

The practical difference is large. "Penicillin" rules out a whole drug class, possibly for life, possibly wrongly. "Penicillin, rash at age nine, no breathing difficulty" is something a clinician can work with, and it is exactly the detail that vanishes from memory within a decade. Write the substance, the reaction, and roughly when.

What does a second opinion need that a routine visit does not?

Longetic holds the medications, visits and lab values that make up most of a routine summary, but a second opinion also needs documents only institutions can issue, and those take time to request. Four of the twelve items below you can assemble tonight. The rest you have to ask for, and the imaging is usually the slowest. For a specialist visit the same logic applies to the questions you bring, and <a href="https://longetic.com/blog/questions-to-ask-a-sleep-specialist/">what to ask a specialist before the visit</a> sets out ten of them.

MedlinePlus is specific about the imaging, and it is the item people most often assume has already been shared: you may be asked for copies of x-rays and scans "either on film or CD, or viewable through a patient portal" (MedlinePlus). Mayo Clinic also asks for pathology slides (Mayo Clinic Connect).

One logistical detail costs people appointments. Mayo Clinic asks that outside records go to the care team rather than the records office, sent "by attaching the records to a message within the Patient Portal" (Mayo Clinic). A perfect package delivered to the wrong internal address produces a consultation where nothing has been read.

Which apps assemble these sections for you?

Longetic, Guava Health, Carrot Care, CareClinic, CommonHealth, Google Health and Sync.MD are the seven apps of fourteen we checked that publish a way to produce a summary rather than only an export. Only CommonHealth publishes that its summary follows the international standard. The other six produce a document of their own design.

An export and a summary solve opposite problems. An export exists so you own a copy; a summary exists so somebody else can read it quickly. Several of the strongest record vaults here publish excellent exports and no summary at all. As a disclosure, Longetic is our product, so weigh the first row of the table accordingly. Every cell comes from the vendor's own site, help centre or store listing, and where a vendor publishes nothing we wrote "not published" rather than guessing. The product itself is described on the app page, including what Longetic publishes and what it does not.

Prices, where published, range from free to $499 a year. Longetic is $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year on the United States App Store, Guava Health publishes a free tier and $78 a year, KeepMD $6.99 a month or $59.99 a year, Healthmatters.io $79 a year or a one-off $250, Heads Up Health $9.00 a month, PicnicHealth $499 a year. CommonHealth and OneRecord describe themselves as free, and CareClinic publishes no price at all.

None of this decides the question above it. A summary written by hand in a notes app, with the three mandatory sections filled in properly, beats a generated one with a half-finished medication list.

How do you hand it over, and what stays in your chart?

Longetic, like most apps here, hands the clinician a document, and a document is read and then set down. There are four routes: a document you show, a link or QR code, a code the clinician types into a browser, and data written into your chart. Only the last leaves anything behind in the clinic's own system.

Apple is the only product we checked that publishes that last route. Its Share with Provider feature shows your data "in an Apple-designed web application ('web app') accessible from inside the EHR's patient chart", with a scratchpad for copying text across (Apple). The prerequisites narrow it sharply: a United States organisation, a signed addendum and business associate agreement, and one of "Cerner Millennium with Ignite APIs, CommunityWorks, or PowerWorks; CPSI Evident Thrive; DrChrono; MEDITECH Expanse" (Apple). Epic does not appear on that published list, so the route most likely to reach your chart is also the one least likely to exist where you are going.

Epic solves it from the other end. A Share Everywhere code gives someone "temporary access to your medical record in any web browser", and the recipient "can view your information and write a note back to your health system" (MyChart). That note is the one thing here that reliably flows backwards.

Google Health is the newest and the most explicit: announced on 7 May 2026 with rollout from 19 May, it creates a SMART link and QR code "that automatically expires after 7 days", saves the summary as a Wallet pass, and lets you "revoke access anytime" (Google). CommonHealth caps its summary at 72 hours behind a six-digit passcode (CommonHealth).

An expiry is a feature. A link that never closes is your medical history sitting in somebody's inbox indefinitely. Paper has the opposite property: it cannot be revoked, which is the trade you make when you hand over a printout.

How fast can you get the sections you are missing?

Longetic and every other app here hold copies, not originals, so anything missing has to come from the provider who made it. In the United States you have a statutory right to a copy, in the form and format you ask for where that is readily producible, and the clock is thirty days.

Under the HIPAA Privacy Rule a covered entity "must provide the individual with access to the protected health information in the form and format requested by the individual, if it is readily producible", and must act "no later than 30 days after receipt of the request", extendable "by no more than 30 days", with "only one such extension of time" (45 CFR 164.524). A provider who obstructs that access may also be engaged in information blocking, "a practice that ... is likely to interfere with access, exchange, or use of electronic health information" (45 CFR 171.103).

These are not dormant rules. On 27 August 2026 the Office for Civil Rights settled what it called its 55th enforcement action under the Right of Access Initiative, over records not provided within thirty days (HHS). The plumbing is moving too: on 26 June 2026 the Department of Health and Human Services said records exchanged through the national framework had grown "from 10 million to more than 1 billion" in under a year (HHS).

All of that is United States law. It does not describe your rights in the European Union or the United Kingdom, where both the entitlements and the deadlines differ, and the cross-border case has its own page: seeing a doctor abroad and which records to bring.

In what order should you actually do this?

Start with the three sections you can write yourself tonight, because they are the mandatory ones and they cost nothing but an evening. Request the institutional documents the same week, because a United States provider has thirty days and imaging is the slowest item. Assemble and hand over last, when you know what actually arrived.

The order matters because the two halves have different clocks. What you write yourself is finished the evening you sit down to it. What a hospital has to issue is finished when the hospital says so, and in the United States that can lawfully be thirty days after you ask, extendable once by thirty more.

Step 1. Write the three mandatory sections tonight

Medications with the dose and how long you have taken each one, allergies with the reaction each substance produced and roughly when, and the conditions you currently have. These are the three the international standard marks required, and they are the three a clinician reads first. Nobody else can write them for you, because no single provider holds all of it.

Step 2. Add why you are here and what has changed

Neither is in the standard, but a clinician meeting you for the first time needs both before anything else. Put them above everything else in your own document. A summary that opens with the reason for the visit is read as an answer; one that opens with a data dump is read as homework.

Step 3. Request the institutional documents the same week

The pathology report, the operative report, the discharge summary and the imaging come from the hospital, the laboratory or the imaging centre, not from you and not from an app. In the United States the Privacy Rule gives a covered entity thirty days from receipt of the request, extendable by no more than thirty more, with only one such extension permitted. Imaging and pathology slides are usually the slowest, so they go first in the queue, not last.

Step 4. Pull what your portal will give you

A patient portal will hand over a standardised slice immediately, and that slice got larger this year. Since 1 January 2026 the older United States Core Data for Interoperability version 1 has expired as an adopted standard for certified health IT, leaving version 3 as the baseline, which adds classes an app could not previously request. Download it, then deal with the part that has to come on paper or a CD. Getting the file into something that can read it is a separate problem, covered in getting the file off a computer and into an app.

The version number is not a detail. MyChart tells you that an app "can only request a standard set of information called the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI)" without saying which version, and the version is what decides whether a data class is in the set at all. The expiry of version 1 is written into the regulation itself at 45 CFR 170.213.

Step 5. Decide what the person in the room actually reads

A portal export can run to hundreds of pages, and nobody reads it during a twenty-minute consultation. The export is the evidence; your three mandatory sections plus the reason for the visit are the document. Hand over the short one, and bring the long one in case a specific number is questioned.

Step 6. Check the recipient can open it before you rely on it

A link that needs an account, an app the clinic has not installed, or a share code that has quietly expired all fail at the same moment, which is the moment you are sitting in front of the doctor. Paper never fails to open and never expires, and it also cannot be withdrawn afterwards. That is the whole trade.

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