December 9th, 2011 by Elaine Schattner, M.D. in Opinion, True Stories
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Over the weekend I developed another bout of diverticulitis. Did the usual: fluids, antibiotics, rest, avoided going to the ER, cancelled travel plans.
One of my doctors asked a very simple question: is this happening more frequently? The answer, we both knew, was yes. But I don’t have a Personal Health Record (PHR) that in principle, through a few clicks, would give a time-frame graph of the bouts and severity of the episodes over the past several years.
The last time this happened, and the time before that, I thought I’d finally start a PHR. Like most compulsive patients, I keep records about my health. In the folder in my closet in a cheap old-fashioned filing box, the kind with a handled top that flips open, I’ve got an EKG from 15 years ago, an Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*
October 6th, 2011 by StevenWilkinsMPH in Opinion
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Irrational exuberance was a term once used to describe the stock market before the last crash. It also seems an apt description for much of the talk these days about empowered health consumers.
To be sure, patients today have unprecedented access to health information. Patient decision-support tool can be found on just about every provider, payer and self-insured employer website. Consumers can go to any number of websites to find quality data about hospitals, physicians and health plans. Personal health records (PHRs) promise to make our personal health data portable for meaning that all our treating physicians will be “singing off the same song sheet.”
That’s what the industry experts tell us. But what’s really going on? Here I will describe what I see as the top 5 myths about empowered health consumers. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Mind The Gap*
May 29th, 2011 by DavedeBronkart in Research
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The Society for Participatory Medicine was well represented last week at the 14th ICSI/IHI Colloquium. (ICSI is the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement, a small midwestern think tank that’s way too poorly known.) SPM members who presented:
- Jane Sarasohn-Kahn of Health Populi gave the keynote for Day 2
- Jessie Gruman, four time cancer patient and founding co-editor of our journal, gave an important breakout session, about which I’ll be writing soon. (Jessie is founder and president of the excellent Center For Advancing Health.)
- Brian Ahier presented on the status of health IT, as Meaningful Use rolls out. (“You can’t measure the improvements that you gotta measure, unless you have computers keeping track of it.”)
- I gave a half-day pre-conference workshop titled “Participatory Health: Reshaping Patient Care.” I’m told the workshop had 40-50% higher registration than usual: interest in participatory medicine is strong.
An unexpected bonus was that right outside the workshop door, a poster presentation addressed some questions people often ask about patient participation and online health records:
- Will patients with problems actually use a PHR (personal health record)? (Many observers say PHRs are a non-starter, a pointless exercise.) Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at e-Patients.net*
April 29th, 2010 by Felasfa Wodajo, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Research
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Check out John Halamka’s post on some of the excellent work one of the workgroups convened by the feds is doing. Here’s the complete quote:
Imagine if every EHR could send data to every other EHR using a simple addressing mechanism like email, a consistent REST implementation or a well described SOAP WSDL. Interoperability would follow rapidly because novel packages of data will be sent to support real business needs without any barriers of how to get the data from endpoint to endpoint.
The “addressing” part of the NHIN (Nationwide Health Information Network) Direct specifications is almost complete. The “implementation” workgroup is part of the fast moving NHIN Direct project which is developing lightweight standards for machine-to-machine communication of medical information. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at a few thoughts from a tumor surgeon*
March 29th, 2010 by KevinMD in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion
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A personal health record (PHR) has been touted as a way for patients to better keep track of their health information. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault lead the way. But what happens if the company storing your data gets bought, goes bankrupt, or simply decides to discontinue their system?
Well, those who stored their data with Revolution Health are finding out first hand. The troubled company, which started off with so much fanfare yet died in a whimper, recently announced they’re shutting down their personal health record service. According to American Medical News: “Industry insiders say Revolution joins a long list of vendors who launched PHRs with a big splash, only to find little interest from consumers.”
Most of my patients don’t use a personal health record, and prefer that I enter the data in myself, or export it from from my electronic record system. The problem is: a) there isn’t enough time in a 15-minute patient visit to help patients enter in their data (apart from what I already do in my own system), and b) many online personal health record sites aren’t compatible with the systems doctors are using.
Leaving the data entry to the patient is inefficient, and a sure way to minimize the adoption rate. Indeed, “the most successful PHR-type systems have been created by healthcare organizations and have benefits to patients, such as e-mailing with physicians, online appointment scheduling and the ability to look at information entered by their physicians.”
That means a successful personal health records have to be well-integrated with or designed by existing hospital and physician systems, making it harder for a third-party system, such as the defunct Revolution Health service, to gain traction.
*This blog post was originally published at KevinMD.com*
