There is no international medical record. Nothing you have built up in one country follows you to the next. When you land, your new doctor starts from an empty page, and the only history that exists is whatever you carried with you.
People usually find this out at the worst possible moment:
- A child cannot enrol at school.
- A pharmacist will not fill a repeat prescription.
- A specialist wants a scan from four years ago, sitting on a server in another country.
All of it is avoidable. But the work has to happen before you move.
Most of what follows is true of any border.
Australia is worked through in full further down. It is the system I know best. It is also a fair example of the shape you will meet almost anywhere: a right to your records, a waiting period, a national vaccination register, and a translation problem. Only the names change.
Disclosure: I am a doctor and I founded exora, which is software for holding your own health record. It appears once near the end.
Before you leave: collect it, and start early
Almost every developed country gives you a legal right to a copy of your own records. Almost every one attaches a waiting period, and sometimes a fee.
Only the name changes:
- A subject access request in the United Kingdom and Europe.
- A HIPAA request in the United States.
- An Australian Privacy Principle 12 request here.
The step is the same everywhere. You ask in writing, and you wait.
Ask every provider separately. Your family doctor, each specialist, the hospitals, the pathology labs, the imaging practices. No one of them holds the whole picture and none of them will chase the others for you.
Ask for electronic copies. A PDF crosses a border. A manila envelope of X-ray film does not, and a disc from an imaging practice is already close to unreadable on current machines.
Three things are worth chasing hardest, because they are what you will be asked for:
- Your immunisation history.
- Your scans as files, not just the written reports.
- A current medication list using generic names.
Start months ahead. If each of six providers takes up to thirty days, the arithmetic does not work in the fortnight before a flight.
What a new doctor actually needs
Not everything. The consultation where you try to reconstruct fifteen years from memory is neither accurate nor cheap, and the fix is one page rather than a folder.
Here is what earns a place on that page:
- Your main diagnoses, and roughly when each started.
- Your current medicines, with doses.
- Your allergies, and what the reaction actually was.
- Your operations.
- Your vaccinations.
- Any recent results or scans that matter.
If you bring one thing, bring that page.
Everything else is the evidence behind the page, useful when a question gets specific and not before.
Your medicines change name at the border
This is the part that catches nearly everybody, and it has nothing to do with paperwork.
Drug brand names are national and they do not survive the flight. Even generic names split across English-speaking countries: paracetamol here and in the United Kingdom is acetaminophen in the United States and Japan. Adrenaline is epinephrine. Salbutamol is albuterol. The molecule is identical; the box, the label and the word are not.
So a medication list carrying only brand names is close to worthless the moment you land. Write the generic name, the dose, the frequency, and what it is for. The last one matters more than people expect: a pharmacist who knows why you take something can suggest a local equivalent when the exact product does not exist.
Check before you move, not after, whether your medicine is available where you are going and whether it is legal there. Things that are routine in one country are controlled in another.
Vaccination records have to be re-registered
Wherever you go, immunisations given elsewhere are usually not recognised automatically. Most countries run a national register, most require documentation in the local language, and most will only accept it through a recognised provider rather than from you directly.
This matters more than it sounds. Vaccination status is often tied to things that are not medical at all, like school and childcare enrolment, and in some countries to family payments.
Expect that the schedules will not line up perfectly, and that some catch-up doses will be needed. That is normal. It does not mean anything was done badly.
If you are moving to or from Australia
The specifics, since they are the ones I can state precisely.
My Health Record does not travel. It is an Australian system. It does not follow you, no overseas clinician can reach into it, and it should be treated as a source to copy from rather than something you will still have. Download what is in it before you go, along with your immunisation history statement, through myGov or the 1800MEDICARE app.
Leaving: your right of access sits under the Privacy Act. Providers have 30 days to respond and may charge a reasonable fee, so start months out and ask every provider separately.
Arriving, vaccinations are the urgent one. Overseas vaccinations are not recognised here automatically. You need to take the record, in English, to a vaccination provider - in practice, a GP. They check it and add it to the Australian Immunisation Register.
Until that happens, a child counts as unvaccinated. That affects more than health:
- School and childcare enrolment.
- Family Tax Benefit Part A.
- The Child Care Subsidy.
To get the full payments, a child has to be up to date, on a catch-up schedule, or medically exempt.
And a thing almost nobody is told: new migrants can have up to ten documents translated free in their first two years in Australia. Ten is not a whole history, so spend them deliberately - the immunisation record, the discharge summary from the operation, the specialist letter that explains the diagnosis.
A workable order of operations
Three to six months before you fly:
- Ask every provider for your records, in writing, electronically.
- Download whatever your current country already holds for you.
- Get scans as files, not just the reports.
- Build the one-page summary, and keep it up to date.
- Get your most important documents translated, if you are arriving somewhere that needs them in another language.
Where I think this should be going
The reason exora exists is that you should not have to rebuild that one-page summary every time you cross a border. A record that belongs to you, rather than to a country’s health system, is portable by definition.
Here is what that means in practice. You upload what you have - photograph the paper, drop in the PDFs, however messy it is. It reads them. Hundreds of pages of letters, results and discharge summaries become one profile: your conditions, your medicines, your allergies, your operations, your vaccinations, each with a date and each linked back to the page it came from.
Three parts of it were built for this exact situation:
- Medical terms change with where you are. The record that says paracetamol in Australia says acetaminophen in the United States. That is the generic-names problem above, solved rather than remembered.
- It can be shared with a clinician who has no account and nothing to install, from any browser, in about thirty seconds - and the access ends when you end it.
- It holds everything, including what no national system will ever have: the specialist letter, the scan from the country before this one, the twenty years before any of it was digital.
The point is to walk into your first appointment in a new country able to answer every question properly - as though you had been a patient there for years.
None of that removes the waiting periods, the translation, or the catch-up vaccines. It removes the part where you do all of it again next time.
Going away for a trip rather than for good? Travelling overseas with a medical condition covers the shorter version of this.
The short version
Nothing follows you across a border. Request copies from every provider months before you leave, electronically, and expect a waiting period. A new doctor needs one page: diagnoses, medicines with generic names, allergies and what the reaction was, surgeries, immunisations. Drug names change between countries even in English. Vaccination records almost always need re-registering locally, often in the local language and through a provider. In Australia specifically that means the AIR, and school enrolment plus two family payments depend on it - and new migrants get ten free document translations in their first two years.
