A Turkish health services company has launched an online personal health tracking service that will allow patients to save, track and share their individual health records in online profiles.

“Mymediks will be rather beneficial in closely and continually tracking tests, medical analysis, treatment plans, necessary medicines, doctor visits and other important information about chronic diseases,” Gülara Tırpançeker, the general manager of Tekimed, which is introducing the service in collaboration with Intel, said Wednesday in Istanbul.

Noting that chronic diseases are responsible for 60 percent of deaths in the world according to 2009 statistics from the World Health Organization, or WHO, Gülara Tırpançeker said without precautions, 17 million people could die this year as a result of chronic diseases.

“Personal health record-keepers such as Mymediks is one of the new approaches developed to handle chronic diseases, to decrease medical errors and to help in giving home care,” said Gülara Tırpançeker.

Saying that patients will stop losing their test results thanks to Mymediks, Oğuz Tırpançeker from Tekiped Data Processing Service, said Mymediks had many variations, including applications for the web, flash drives, PCs and mobile phones.

“Thanks to these records, which can be reached 24 hours a day, health experts can be more confident in their decisions and prepare more effective treatment and maintenance choices for patients,” said Oğuz Tırpançeker.

The head of the Medicine Informatics Association’s Istanbul branch, Kemal Kaplan, said Mymediks would fill an important gap in the health service market where social security services and private health insurance companies form the biggest customers.

“Nowadays, we can operate all of our bank activities without going to the bank thanks to technology’s improvement. The same transformation will be observed in health with services in time. These systems [such as Mymediks] need to be commercialized and find a place in the market,” said Kaplan, adding that the new health technology was not cheap, yet would become cheaper over the next four years.

Intel General Manager Çiğdem Ertem said information technology was unable to sufficiently enter the health field in 2006 yet was now progressing.

Health services for severe problems were well conducted but too expensive, she said, adding that quality of life would increase once health care could be performed at home with the help of systems such as Mymediks.

“Mymediks will answer the needs,” said Ertem, adding that Tekimed developed the software on its own.