You’re a PHR vendor? Really?

By Patricia Flatley Brennan, Director, Project HealthDesign.

From the HIT tradeshow floors to the halls of HHS, we’re hearing LOTS about PHR vendors—what is their product? Can it be certified? Should it be HIPAA protected?

But what is it? At Project HealthDesign, we see PHRs as suites of services - platforms, programs and data stores – united in a way that helps individuals manage their health and health care, and perhaps form the very core of crowd-sourced health as in the Asthmapolis.

Vendors of HIT products and PHR tools will play an increasingly important role in mapping out the landscape of personal health information management – but nowhere on the terrain do I see a single vendor for a freestanding PHR taking hold!

It’s time to stop looking for the turnkey PHR and start realizing that the idea of a single PHR as the sole point of intersection for all data, services, and visualization tools needed by a lay person to manage his or her health is so 1999.  It’s time to recognize that the suite of tools needed by one person to manage asthma or handle diabetes might well be quite unique to that person’s life process, health state and personal preferences, and quite different than that needed by another.

All is not lost! Think for a minute why the analogy of a PHR as a great big binder of data is so pleasing – it allows for a single point of entry, it enables extension of known privacy and security approaches, and it most likely tethers patients to a care provider.  All of these advantages are still possible in a distributed model of PHRs, in which data from various sources are integrated on the fly into a single view to help a person to know what action to take now. Privacy and security tools can follow the data, not become the responsibility of the data holder.  Visualization tools can become enablers, not end points.  And the link to the clinical provider is fostered by the value of the care choices enabled, not the ties that bind the data.

A PHR vendor? So 1999 - let’s party like it's 2010 and invite everyone in!

Comments

[twitter.com/VinceKuraitis]

Patti,

Your assessment is right on target. Freestanding PHRs are DOA.

I find it useful to think of hierarchies of platforms and applications...and what looks like a PHR application to one person (or care provider, or vendor) can look like a platform to another.

This increasing lack of tangibility around "what's a PHR" actually is a good thing... we're recognizing (knowing) that that there's still a lot to know.

Vince

[Ahier]

Nice post Patti. I could see the development of modular PHRs becoming what you envision. I use some web based financial tools that do just what you are describing for health information...

[Sarah Apple]

Check out the post from Brian Dolan on mobihealthnews.com that references this post, Mobile health apps to disintermediate PHRs?

http://mobihealthnews.com/8004/mobile-health-apps-to-disintermediate-phrs/

[Electronic Medical Records]

Of course it sounds wonderful but if there was an single PHR which hold all the information then it would be more useful for the patients.