My PHR (Personal Health Record)

Now that we've established a framework for basic terms (see EMR, EHR, PHR Soup) let's take a closer look at the PHR. (For more on the definition of a PHR, check out American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and their myPHR page.)

Basically, a PHR is a consumer centric model (theory?) of maintaining health care information, designed to facilitate management of personal health care records / information. One can use a variety of services, tools, and technologies to accomplish this, but the principal is the same - you gather your records, organize them, and maintain them in a place of your choosing. That place could be the trunk of your car, a file cabinet, your computer hard drive, a USB drive, or an online service. Each one of these places has advantages and disadvantages (trunk of car scores high on mobility, portability, and accessibility for example, but other factors such as spare tires, dampness, and the occasional trunk monkey may outweigh the benefits).

Maybe you already do this in some way shape or form, but if you're like me, your health information is not particularly consolidated, organized, or easy to find. I've got dental records here, children's immunizations there, naturopath visits here, supplements there... you get the idea.

There are a number of emerging technology systems that address the creation of a PHR, but I thought I'd see what the big two had for me (Microsoft and Google) as a starting point.

HealthVault (Microsoft)

The HealthVault system links to your existing windows live ID, so I created an account signed in, browsed around, and found it pretty interesting. I'll let you do the same at this point, and we'll talk about it in another post. Note: I'm going to do some more research on privacy my self before I start divulging my personal health information to an online service. I'll keep you posted on what I find, and what I decide.

Google Health

If you have a GMail account, google makes this easy much like Microsoft. I signed in, created an account, and was greeted with a variety of options to input information related to my Personal Health Records. Again, I'm planning to do some more research before I commit, but I still find the concept interesting.

tsd.

PHR, EMR, EHR Soup

What's all this noise about a PHR? What does it do for me? Should healthcare organizations care? And what does it have to do with an EMR, an EHR, or any one of the other three letter acronyms that the health care informatics industry seems to be so smitten with?

Well, it turns out alot of people are asking themselves the same questions. So in an attempt to shed some light on the subject, I delved a bit deeper.

First I went to the NAHIT Key HIT Terms Report (that's The National Alliance for Health Information Technology Report to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology on Defining Key Health Information Technology Terms, published April 28, 2008).

Through what I can only imagine was some gnashing of teeth, NAHIT managed to put forth the following definitions pertaining to the above acronyms:

Electronic Medical Record (EMR)
An electronic record of health-related information on an individual that can be created, gathered, managed, and consulted by authorized clinicians and staff within one health care organization.

Electronic Health Record (EHR)
An electronic record of health-related information on an individual that conforms to nationally recognized interoperability standards and that can be created, managed, and consulted by authorized clinicians and staff across more than one health care organization.

Personal Health Record (PHR)
An electronic record of health-related information on an individual that conforms to nationally recognized interoperability standards and that can be drawn from multiple sources while being managed, shared, and controlled by the individual.

In summary, EMRs and EHRs are tools for providers while PHRs are the means to engage individuals in their health and well-being.

And that leads me to the next place of interest, the PHR. More coming on this later.

tsd.