PHR Fragmentation: A Persistent Hurdle

Project HealthDesign National Advisory Committee member David Lansky, executive director of the Markle Foundation’s Personal Health Technology Initiative, was interviewed by Digital HealthCare & Productivity on why fragmentation across PHR products—and the systems they operate within—continues to undermine their potential for helping patients to really take charge of their health in a meaningful way. Lansky says,

"We appreciate all these electronic tools but it doesn’t add up to an empowered consumer until the network environment permits information to flow into a tool that the consumer controls and manages."

The full Q&A is available here.

Comments

[Rahul Shetty M.D]

There are more than 200 different vendors of PHR products in the world today.The lack of inter connectivity between various PHR products and also with mainstream hospital Electronic medical records results in islands of health information.

Moreover,these products are not enabled with search functions which may result in overload of health information to physicians over a period of time.

Connectivity with physicians,patients and health centers health information data is one of the key steps to be taken to empower individuals to have better control over their health related information.

[Bernard Farrell]

Will the fact that Microsoft and Google are moving into the PHR marketplace mean that this fragmentation will decrease?

Is there any way to use extensible formats (e.g. XML-based) to make the fragmentation easier to deal with?