The folks at MyFamilyHealth.com have combined online genealogy, social networking, and basic personal health record management for a single and eminently useful purpose: learning more about your family’s medical history to help improve your own health by better understanding your genetic risks. It will be fascinating to see how people use it over the next few years.

I built my own family history account this morning and found these important benefits:

• Create a social network of your family members and share your medical history with them. It would be interesting to see if they make a facebook application soon to tie in with other social networking tools.
• Discover and learn about the health problems that run in your family – including conditions that might not otherwise be considered by your physician.
• Discover if you or your family members could benefit from specific diagnostic, genetic or screening tests.This is probably the area they are making money so it’s good to see a viable business model.
• You can share your family health history with your physician and receive better guidance to delay, improve or even prevent bad health. This is a good way to promote the service, too.
• Although I didn’t try it, they claim they can Import your family tree from genealogy sites like geni.com and ancestry.com.