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.
Posts Tagged ‘PHRs’
PHRs, EHRs and Social Media – Where are We Headed?
February 2, 2010
Two coincidental articles were published today. First, in iHealthBeat, John Moore and Matthew Holt talk about why ”Consumers Not Ready for Do-It-Yourself PHRs.” In response to the decision by Revolution Health to discontinue their PHR, the experts comment that “the direct-to-consumer market for PHRs just doesn’t work.” But they say that populated records are the future, those tethered to EHRs, like Kaiser’s and how Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault enable this kind of population of data from other sources. In the future, as it is now for some, the PHR will not be separate from the EHR, just the interface on the front of patient data. But this will mean patient entered data, like diaries of their conditions, and from home monitoring devices.
The second article appeared in JAMA, from the Centre for eHealth Innovation in Toronto, titled, “Electronic Health Records in the Age of Social Networks and Global Telecommunications.” Here the authors talk about the intersection of social media and EHRs. Specifically, the authors envision the future with open standards which can enhance interoperability and “natural language enrich by audio or video…Rich media has the potential to reduce ambiguity and enhance performance in complex tasks.”
So while the concept of PHRs may be on the decline, the future of patient empowerment through information has only begun. The convergence of personal health information, provider-based information and social and rich media will provide a basis for future health decisions on a very individual, personal level.
Major Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Report on PHRs
January 19, 2010
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has published an 7 chapter online book about Personal Health Records. The book is a great summary of the current state of PHRs as well as initiatives promoted by Project Health Design. Chapters are:
Chapter 1: Personal Health Records 101
Chapter 2: Project HealthDesign and the Next Generation of Personal Health Records
Chapter 3: Observations of Daily Living
Chapter 4: The Health Information Technology Landscape
Chapter 5: Personal Health Records and Health Information Technology—Costs, Policies and the Incentives Driving Adoption
Chapter 6: Privacy and Personal Health Records
Chapter 7: Personal Health Records—Business Models, Open Platforms and the Challenges Ahead
Worthy of note is chapter 3 on Observations of Daily Living (ODL), the importance of having patients enter their own daily activities and disease experience into a PHR. While the chapter does not specifically mention social networking sites like Organized Wisdom or PatientsLikeMe, the implication is that these type of tools provide value, often unrealized, by most provider organizations. ODLs could also include direct input into a tethered PHR or via home monitoring devices.
Also presented well is the discussion of the Health IT landscape and the emphasis on open platforms. Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health are described as revolutionary innovations. They provide PHRs with open connections to EHRs and devices as well as a portable, web-based record empowering patients to bring their records to any provider.
They conclude with addressing business models and incentives to make PHRs successful. “Open platforms create a wide avenue for innovation in health care” and the need to move past proprietary models is promoted. I might add that existing proprietary EMRs must be able to talk to the open platforms through web services or the CCR standard. There is no excuse for not adapting to these standards to enable the transfer of data into patients’ control.
Looking toward future and the new grant recipients for Project Health Design, the authors conclude: “They will face a number of challenges, including how to capture observations of daily living (ODLs); how to aggregate and analyze those data in a PHR; how to use the findings to inform the clinical encounter; and, ultimately, how to empower patients to understand, influence and improve their health. ”
Mayo Clinic Launches Health Manager using HealthVault
April 22, 2009
Mayo Clinic has announced its new Personal Health Record called Health Manager. Besides a feature rich tool including managing personal health information, monitoring health using a dashboard feature and getting health advice (integration with their health content), there are some significant aspects of this announcement:
- partnership with Microsoft HealthVault - right behind New York Presbyterian. The first two large medical centers to announce their Microsoft partnership
- this occurred right after the announcement of stricter HIPAA rules under the HITECH federal regulations
- It is offered to the general public and not just patients of Mayo Clinic. MyNYP approaches this in the same way. It focuses it health information on heart health with an intro by Mehmet Oz of the You books fame.
The strategy appears to be to offer a service and potential attract new patients. The extent of the integration strategy with Microsoft HealthVault is unclear – can one create an account at one of these sites but then login directly through HealthVault? These two new sites will be interesting to watch.
Interoperability and PHRs
March 23, 2009
On John Halamka’s CIO blog, he does a good job of introducing the basics of the Healthcare IT alphabet soup and then some. Specifically, he addresses his opinions on:
- interoperability: “meaningful use will include: Problems lists/Diagnoses, Medications including e-prescribing, Allergies, Text-based summaries, Quality data sets, Population health data sets submitted to CDC, public health departments, and other government agencies.”
- PHRs and Smart Cards: “Smart cards have not received wide acceptance in any US industry, although they are very popular in other parts of the world….I believe it is much more likely that web-based Personal Health
Records, such as those provided by Google, Microsoft, and Dossia, will
be more popular than smart cards. These PHRs are secure, protect
confidentiality, and are automatically updated by labs, pharmacies,
hospitals, and clinician offices.”
Smart cards were recently endorsed byt the Committee on Operating Rules for Information Exchange.
I agree with Halamka on this – I think PHRs such as Google Health have a better chance of adoption in the US.
HIMSS eHealth SIG to present on PHRs
February 11, 2009
The Webex will occur on Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 3pm EST. They made a good choice of presenters:
- Wes Rishel, VP and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc.
- Matt Guldin, Product Manager, HealthNet, former Industry Analyst with Frost & Sullivan
I’ve known Matt for some time now – he brings a broad perspective on this and, of course, Gartner always has its hands on the pulse of things.
If you are interested in attending, contact Ben Dillion at ben.dillon@geonetric.com.
The HIMSS eHealth Special Interest Group will also meet in person at the Annual HIMSS conference in Chicago. The meeting will be Monday, April 6, 2009 from 1:00 – 2:30pm at the Hyatt Conference Center in room 12AB. The topic is “Health 2.0.” Watch this blog for more info. I will be there.
PHRs going way of online banking?
February 8, 2009
According to Roni Zeiger of Google Health, PHRs may follow the pattern of online banking. Speaking at the Towards an Electronic Patient Record conference, he predicted that like the early suspicions about online banking and now general acceptance, a similar adoption of PHRs will occur as consumers find utility in the tools which are available. He rejected the idea that stronger privacy laws will bring wider adoption. He also notes the concerns of physicians interacting with PHRs – if they are going to view patient data from these, it needs to be simple and fit into their current workflow of information.
While we’re not there yet, the is some progress in adoption and he emphasized Google’s long term commitment to this initiative.
PHR Presenations at AMIA
November 10, 2008
At the American Medical Informatics Association, there have been panels and papers on PHRs. This morning was a panel including John Halamka of Partners Healthcare and Roni Zeiger of Google Health discussing the different models – tethered, provider based, platforms, commercial based, etc. The Q & A provided some interesting insights, particularly a question about what to expect next – to take patient symptoms and conditions and then generate a selected list of questions to ask your doctor.
Coincidentally, there was an announcement by the Cleveland Clinic today (not on the panel) of a partnership with Microsoft HealthVault to collection information from home monitoriing devices and feed them through HealthVault into the MyChart PHR.
Another presentation was on consumer-based folksonomies within PatientLikeMe.com based on symptoms entered. Someone suggested that within these online communities, patients begin to approximate the physician taxonomy based on their desired to communicate effectively with their physicians.
Project Health Design Conference video available
September 19, 2008
“Design Teams Unveil Innovative PHR Applications that Help People Take Charge of Their Health. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-sponsored project demonstrates how a new vision for personal health records can transform the way people engage in health care.”
Next-Generation PHRs
September 17, 2008
The Fall is certainly the season for conferences. Besides the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, there will be a conference sponsored by Project Health Design on this topic which begins tomorrow, Sept. 17th in Washington, DC. Some major players will present their models including representatives from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Johnson & Johnson and the eHealth Initiative.
One quote from the program: “Project HealthDesign teams demonstrate that their applications can link PHRs with a range of technologies people use every day – cell phones, digital assistants and others. People will use new ways to interact with technologies – speech, gestures and even device-to-device connections.” Exciting stuff.
I hope that proceedings, audio or video will be available in the near future since I will not be able to attend either conference this year.
Shameless Self Promotion
July 2, 2008
Once in a while you have to promote yourself. Well, in this case HIMSS has done it for me. I am pleased to receive the Spirit of HIMSS Award. Nice article about me appears today in their HIMSS Weekly Insider.
Not often does one get such acknowledgment for volunteer work but HIMSS finds ways to do this on a regular basis as they are dependent on many devoted volunteers to make the organization a success. I am pleased to be part of that process. I am in good company for this award.
