Best Practices for Employers Offering PHRs

Posted by Lygeia Ricciardi on December 20, 2007

Yesterday the Health Privacy Project, the California HealthCare Foundation, and a group of corporate and nonprofit leaders released “Best Practices for Employers Offering Personal Health Records (PHRs)”. While a number of companies already are offering PHRs to their employees, concerns about consumer anxiety and regulatory uncertainty persist. The ten Best Practices are designed to address these concerns.

Highlights of the Best Practices include that employers should give employees control of access to and use of the PHR, and the establishment of “chain of trust” agreements between employers and their business partners to assure that information in the PHR is consistently protected. The companies and organizations that developed the Best Practices include the Center for Democracy & Technology, Dell, Google, Hewitt Associates, IBM, the Markle Foundation, Omnimedix Institute, Pfizer, Pitney Bowes, Revolution Health, Wal-Mart, and WebMD.

For the full story, go to www.healthprivacy.org/bestpractices

Comments

[Ted Eytan]

Lygeia, simple principles like this are useful to have and add to the general lowering of hurdles to providing patient-centered care. I mentioned an example of reduced uptake in an organization recently because of unclear policies (see: http://www.pchit.org/2007/12/18/224/)

Now that this is out there, is there a directory anywhere of employers that are providing PHRs for their staff, features, and adherence to the practices?

Thanks for participating in this work!

-Ted

[Lygeia Ricciardi]

Thanks, Ted --

That's a really good idea. Such a resource does not yet exist, but it's certinly something the Employers' Working Group on PHRs could consider establishing--I'll pass it on. The group's next task is developing a model "notice of information practices" that will assist employers in crafting a statement that clearly explains how they handle (or don't handle) employee information in a PHR. From the consumer's perspective I think it would be terrific to have a consistent set of criteria against which to compare multiple PHRs, whether offered through an employer or not. The Best Practices would be a great starting point for creating such a tool.

- Lygeia