"Welcome to our company blog. Within these blog posts, we hope to share our insights on clinical quality management, the patient-centered medical home, chronic disease management in primary care, evidence-based medicine, and the use of technology in ambulatory care settings."

- David Morin, CEO and Donald Nease Jr., MD, Chief Medical Officer

Type "personal health record" into your favorite search engine and you will be overwhelmed with the number of vendors offering such a solution.

I'm intrigued with the variety of stakeholders offering such solutions; software start-ups, employers, payors, EMR vendors and portal and search engine providers all have a PHR that they think you should be using. I'll bet there 100s of PHR solutions now available.


When evaluating these solutions, a few characteristics are key for adoption:


From the patient's perspective:

• Ubiquity and Patient Ownership - the PHR record is ultimately the property of the patient. It must be transportable into every situation in which a patient needs it and it must be accessible by the patient at any time.
• Adds Value - a record on it's own has value, but a PHR solution that can add value around the record is of great value. Care reminders, links to literature are all examples.
• Is Correct - those that populate from claims data will be populated with data that was never intended for clinical documentation, only for reimbursement. If you diagnose that wheezing patient with asthma and that patient, who is ultimately found to NOT have asthma, sees he's asthmatic in his personal health record, might 1) decide this PHR can't be trusted and not use it or 2) call your practice in a panic asking why you never told him he was asthmatic (and have trust issues with you as a provider).

From the provider's perspective:

• Easily accessed - and I mean "easy"! When the average visit is 16.5 minutes, even one minute to fumble through access of this record will make this a no -deal.
• Complete Picture - a PHR that only tells a part of the story isn't of much value if the provider still has to go back and verify and document everything.
• Is Correct- if it doesn't provide accurate clinical data, there's no reason to use it.

Any PHR vendor that would find any of the bullets above to not be in their best interest is probably one that won't survive. That leads me to think right now that vendors such as Google, Microsoft and Revolution Health probably represent the best strategies, IF they can provide the features above.



Dave Morin
CEO
Cielo MedSolutions