You tell me: What's a PHR?

It is important to educate consumers about Personal Health Records-Definition,before we can deluge into its benefits.Although it’s one thing to document your medical information. It’s another to know when and how to use it.
Despite the widespread use of PHR,still many are unaware of its basic definition.

I think we need to clarify that "Personal" in Personal Health Record means that the consumer/owner can control WHO HAS ACCESS to that information .... but NOT WHAT THAT INFORMATION IS.

In my opinion, a Personal Health Record that allows the consumer to control the information in it will fail miserably, at least in a clincal sense. (As a vector for targeted advertising, it may of course still be fabulously successful. But I think most people have higher hopes than that.)

Health care is already an extremely litigious activity, and may well become more so in the future.

Want to make a lot of easy money? Edit your penicillin allergy out of your PHR. Edit out your allergy reaction to last year's flu shot.

If providers can't trust the PHR to be complete, at least for the periods/info it purports to include, they can't use it.

If they can't use it, they have no incentive to spend extra time and money pushing data into it.

d.d.

The elephant in the PHR space is the problem of how PHRs become populated. Scores of companies offer empty containers they hope consumers will fill with their own health information. These "do-it-yourself" interfaces and formats are almost universally unusable because of thoughtless technical design. And, almost no sane human would ever to the work required to abstract their own medical records -- even if they went to the trouble of acquiring them. On the other hand, the idea of using "cash register tape" to populate PHRs from insurance claims is only slightly less silly. A number of decisive flaws make that approach unreliable, even in the VA. However, there is a simple, rational solution that most writers have missed: The PHR should be owned and controlled by the patient, but should be produced and maintained by qualified, medical professionals from an expert review and abstraction of original source documents. There's no way around having the PHR created by professional, expert abstractors. Then, it must be edited for accuracy by the patient and providers -- because careful abstraction always reveals significant errors. While this process is labor intensive (once), and costs about what a CT scan does, its value is easily recovered for the patients who actually need PHRs.

Anne,

What's a PHR? We don't know. Hat's off to you for your insights. What's "health" for that matter?

There are things we can be doing now - "whats a prescription drug?; what's a lab test?; who do you know I am who I say I am?; how do I know this information hasn't been corrupted?; the list goes on and on.

Asking the wrong questions is in my view an exercise in futility. Focusing on parts of what we think many will be viewed as part of their definition of a PHR is a very good idea.

Again, thanks for your comments.

Mark

The PHR is a great way to consolidate disparate medical records. Right now there isn't enough utility in the technology to be beneficial to patients, and hence low usage. However as we are doing with our PHR, worldmedcard.com , it's FREE to the patient and completely independent of payors. Given we're supported with an online ad model, no information is shared with any outside entity. Anyone who would put their health information in an Insurer sponsored or employer sponsored product is an idiot! It's conflict of interest. End solution must be of use to both the provider and the consumer... and be free to both. Wait and see.. we'll have some interesting features coming soon. -Curt

Ann,

I totally agree with everything you have said. The PHR has become a catchall for everything that is unclear about what a continuous individual's health record should contain and who owns the data. There is much confusion about how the PHR and the EHR interactand that is compounded when description abound about a PHR on a chip or PHR access can be embedded in a person's arm or leg. The healthcare space is fraught with contradictions and confusions. No wonder so many docs just want to be left alone to practice medicine and not worry about implementing these technologies even though they recognize the benefits to having electronic records.