John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Verizon Employees Get PHR
May 11, 2007
Offered through WebMD, Verizon employees (not customers) will be offered a PHR called Verizon HealthZone PHR. With 900,000 employees, it creates a large user pool. However, it will be initially offered to only 40,000, still a sizable pilot group. It will be interesting to watch home many actually adopt it since it is employer-based. “Verizon Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg announced the Electronic Personal Health Records tool during a roundtable discussion on the
shift toward a value-driven care system.”
“The Electronic Personal Health Records program is voluntary and works this way: After an employee enrolls, health care information is imported and managed from various sources — physicians, nurses, hospitals, pharmacies, labs, as well as information entered by the employee, including family history.” Additional, it works independent of the employee health plan. One has to wonder if it will be tied to consumer-directed healthcare and to what extent it will be wireless-enabled.
