Archive for March 23rd, 2009
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.
