Analysis of family health history data collection patterns in consumer-oriented Web-based tools.

Current trends have brought resurgent interest in developing consumer-oriented tools that gather patient-entered clinical data. Family health history data has long been recognized as valuable for risk assessment in primary care, but has gained renewed attention recently as part of IT-oriented efforts in personalized medicine. In order to better understand the breadth of data collected in consumer-oriented web applications, we evaluated their collection patterns using the recommendations issued by the American Health Information Community (AHIC).