By Amanda Hershberg
Amanda is a KinKeeper user whose husband’s military career has taken the family around the country. Here she shares some of the ways KinKeeper can help other military families stay organized and updated as they face the moves and transitions that come along.
PCS season is upon us! It is a time of great anticipation for our next experience as a military family, but also the knowledge that it’s a lot of work. Sure there are many challenges that go along with the move beyond packing clothes, furniture and saying all our goodbyes to our friends. The biggest challenge (and dread) for all of us with families and pets is finding, scheduling, and updating new pediatricians, specialists, veterinarians and school administrators.
Even the simplest new patient and student intake forms can get overwhelming after filling them out again, but
the thought of digging through my files to find the notes from the last pediatrician visit for my kids, the text about why the dog is on his medication, or the immunization record that I know the school will ask for is as exhausting as the information hunt itself.
I wish I would have had KinKeeper when we made our most recent cross-country move. The boxes of medical records and paperwork, not to mention the amount of information I had to relay from scratch again when we reached our new home was daunting. I am thankful that I have KinKeeper so I don’t need to start over next time around!
In KinKeeper, I created profiles for myself, my husband, our kids and our pets. The app allows me to create topics to store all of their information, so as I track down the records from my mammograms from the last three states, I can snap a photo and add that to my profile, neatly organized in a digital topic with all the other relevant documents, records and notes. Everyone’s profile contains their medication list, physicians’ names and contact info, documents, pictures and notes — all the info we need no matter where we go.
I shared all of the profiles with my husband so we both have equal access and ownership of our family’s health and health information. I’ll also share some of the kids’ notes with my mom, so she has all the information she needs when the kids visit her.
Using KinKeeper made me realize how much information I need to share repeatedly with babysitters and petsitters, so I also created notes specifically for the people who fill those roles in our lives. I can easily share the specific information with them, and I can even add them as contributors to the notes, where they can add notes about the kids or the dog. I can easily share and revoke access to these notes, just in case it takes me a few tries to get the right people to watch my kids and dog in our new town.
KinKeeper is terrific because I don’t need to go back and enter my entire filing cabinet. I can start simply at any point by setting up a profile, creating a topic and adding a note or item for whatever’s next — an appointment, a new medication, a change in health. Even if you have a good system for transporting your information with each PCS, KinKeeper only makes that easier.
