Peter Mapes

The online submission of personal medical data by pilots via Med Xpress is a singularly bad idea. I've been working with pilots for decades on their medical exams and they frequently misunderstand the instructions, forget issues, or make other errors. The medical history is best taken one on one between the pilot and the Aviation Medical Examiner. While 83% of patients reported a favorable experience with medical history taking on line, the NIH studies looking at this have not assessed the accuracy of the on line histories. My experience has been that on line histories thru Med Xpress are significantly less accurate than histories taken by the physician. My take on this is that the online history makes unintentional errors in the medical history a matter of record. Since all the errors must be corrected between the examiner and the examinee before the medical certificate can be issued anyway, it is not cost effective to enforce a mandatory source of error in the system. Good medical histories are taken by physicians trained to elicit appropriate information, not by computer programs. It would be a huge mistake to make MedXpress mandatory because it will create error, be difficult to fix and introduce error into the system by diminishing patient - physician contact.