ON Healthcare

The Personal Health Record is an evolving concept and is certainly not easy to define. Most attempts so far that I have come across either lean toward the jargon laced and/or breezy marketecture or come in at the other end of the spectrum with a highbrow philosophical structure based on Plato’s theory of forms or an incomprehensible technical treatise provided by either an engineer or medical professional.

Here are a few examples that I have come across and found helpful in shaping my thinking:

Frost and Sullivan provide the following definitation of the PHR in their research entitled Opportunity and Trends in the U.S. Personal Health Records Markets.

Personal health record (PHR) – An electronic, universally available, lifelong resource of health information needed by individuals to make health decisions. Individuals own and manage the information in the PHR, which comes from health care providers and the individual. The PHR is maintained in a secure and private environment, with the individual determining rights of access. The PHR is separate from and does not replace the legal record of any provider.

HIMSS defines an ePHR as in a paper entitled HIMSS Personal Health Records Definition and Position Statement as follows:

An electronic Personal Health Record (“ePHR”) is a universally accessible, layperson comprehensible, lifelong tool for managing relevant health information, promoting health maintenance and assisting with chronic disease management via an interactive, common data set of electronic health information and e-health tools. The ePHR is owned, managed, and shared by the individual or his or her legal proxy(s) and must be secure to protect the privacy and confidentiality of the health information it contains. It is not a legal record unless so defined and is subject to various legal limitations.

Wikipedia’s entry on Personal Health Record is:

A personal health record or PHR is typically a health record that is initiated and maintained by an individual. An ideal PHR would provide a complete and accurate summary of the health and medical history of an individual by gathering data from many sources and making this information accessible online to anyone who has the necessary electronic credentials to view the information.

1. Screen shots of a Google Health EHR prototype!
2. MiCARD portable PHR
3. SSHA focuses on security to provide patient access to EHRs