PHRs create physician fears

These days, the health insurance industry, large employers and even legislators have gotten excited about PHRs. Ask a physician about them, however, and you might see a little less enthusiasm. Doctors are beginning to worry that PHR data may not be accurate or complete and that it will take countless unpaid hours to sift through it all. Worse, they're afraid that they may get a diagnosis wrong if they miss a key detail. In some cases, a two to three-minute oral history might turn out to be more useful than floods of patient-generated data, notes Peter Basch, medical director of e-health at Washington, DC-based MedStar Health.

To address this problem, physicians have begun to insist that patients supply data in the form they request, be it a spreadsheet, paper record or electronic PHR. However, a better long-term solution will be to standardize what data should be included in PHRs, says Steven Waldren, director of the American Academy of Family Physicians' Center for Health Information Technology. At the same time, electronic PHRs should include tools which help the patients make better use of the data themselves, he says. One example was rolled out in early May by Verizon Communications, which included a function which alerts users when their case seems out of line with evidence-based medicine.

To get more background on this issue:
- read this Modern Healthcare article