Every person gets one health story, and one private Family Stork email address every clinic already knows how to use. Tired of managing health records for yourself and everyone you love? Family Stork organizes them for you automatically.
National Family Caregivers Month exists because most caregiving happens invisibly. An adult child takes a half-day off work to drive a parent to the cardiologist. A sibling across the country tries to keep up over the phone. A spouse refills medications and hopes the dosages have not changed since the last visit.
The Caregiver Action Network — the organization behind this month — says the single biggest source of caregiver stress is not the physical work. It is the information burden: keeping track of what happened at the last appointment, which medications changed, which specialist said what, and whether anyone told the primary care doctor.
That burden is a records problem. And records problems have solutions.
If you do one thing this November, gather these five records and put them somewhere you can reach from your phone. Not in a filing cabinet. Not in a portal you cannot remember the password for. Somewhere accessible at 2 a.m. in the emergency room.
Every medication, every dosage, every frequency — including over-the-counter supplements and anything prescribed by a specialist the primary care doctor may not know about. The most common preventable harm during a hospital admission is a medication error caused by an incomplete list.
Where to get it: Ask the pharmacy for a printed medication profile. It shows every active prescription with refill dates. Then check each specialist's patient portal — some medications live only there. If the person you care for has a private Family Stork address on their record, each provider's prescriptions arrive and the list stays current without phone calls.
Primary care doctor, cardiologist, endocrinologist, neurologist, physical therapist, dentist. Name, practice name, phone, fax. When the ER asks "who is the primary care doctor?" at midnight, you need that answer in your hand — not after scrolling through a phone's contact list or calling a sibling who might know.
For parents with five or more providers, this list is the single most valuable document a caregiver can carry.
Medicare card (or Medicare Advantage plan), supplemental or Medigap policy, Part D prescription drug plan, any long-term care insurance. A photo of the front and back of each card, stored digitally, is faster than locating a wallet during an emergency. If your parent is changing plans during Medicare Part D open enrollment (October 15 – December 7), update these records now.
Any hospitalization or ER visit in the past year generates a discharge summary — the diagnosis, treatments, medication changes, and follow-up instructions. A new provider treating a new emergency will look at the most recent discharge summary before anything else. If your parent was hospitalized and you do not have the discharge summary, you can request one from the hospital's medical records department.
What to keep from a hospital discharge →
The advance directive states what your parent wants — resuscitation preferences, ventilator decisions, comfort care instructions. The healthcare proxy (or medical power of attorney, depending on the state) names who makes those decisions. These two documents work together. One without the other creates confusion at the worst possible moment.
Every state has its own form. Many are available free from state health departments or the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. Consult an elder law attorney to make sure the documents are valid in your state.
Medical power of attorney: the records that belong with it →
Most caregivers already know they need these records. The problem is not awareness — it is logistics. Mom's primary care doctor uses one portal. The cardiologist uses another. The hospital uses a third. The pharmacy has its own app. The insurance company mails paper statements. And none of these systems talk to each other.
So the caregiver becomes the integration layer. You are the one calling the specialist's office to fax records to the new doctor. You are the one photographing paper documents with your phone and texting them to your brother. You are the one sitting in the waiting room trying to remember whether the dosage changed at the last visit or the one before.
This is the problem Family Stork was built to solve.
Each person in the family gets one record with a private Family Stork email address — shown on their profile, unique to them. It is a standard email address that uses the @families.familystork.com domain.
Any provider can send records to that address. The clinic does not need to learn new software, sign up for anything, or install an app. They just email — visit summaries, lab results, prescriptions, discharge papers. The records arrive in one timeline and file themselves.
The family members you invite see the same record. Siblings across the country can see the same medication list, the same test results, the same provider notes — without the group text, without "did anyone get the paperwork from Tuesday?"
$99/year for the whole family, or about $10/month. Start free.
You do not have to reorganize everything in November. Start with one thing: the medication list. Get the current list from the pharmacy. Compare it to what each specialist has on file. If anything does not match, call the primary care doctor and reconcile it.
That single step — one accurate, current medication list — prevents more harm than any other record a caregiver can carry.
Then, when you are ready, gather the rest.
National Family Caregivers Month is observed every November to recognize and support the more than 53 million Americans who provide unpaid care to a family member — typically an aging parent, a spouse, or a child with special needs. It was established by the Caregiver Action Network in 1994 and is proclaimed annually by the President of the United States.
At minimum: a current medication list with dosages, a list of every provider with contact information, copies of insurance cards, the most recent hospital discharge summaries, and the advance directive or healthcare proxy. These five records cover what any new provider or emergency team needs to make safe decisions.
The challenge is that each doctor's office uses a separate system. You can request records from each one individually, but they go out of date every time a visit happens. Family Stork gives each person a private email address — any provider emails records to that address and they file into one timeline automatically. No logins, no portals, no manual uploads. Learn more in the caregivers hub →
Yes. In Family Stork, the person who starts the record invites family members. Each invited member sees the same timeline — medications, test results, provider notes, discharge papers. No group texts, no forwarding PDFs, no "did you get the paperwork?" conversations. The record stays in one place. Read more about siblings sharing a parent's record →
No. Family Stork organizes your family's health records — it does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment recommendations. For medical questions, ask your parent's doctor. For emergencies, call 911.
Tired of managing health records for yourself and everyone you love? Family Stork organizes them for you automatically. $99/year, or about $10/month.
Start organizing — free