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Are Health Record Banks the Answer?
November 1, 2007
One of the architects of the national health information infrastructure is pushing local "health records banks" as a sustainable business model for paying for electronic health records systems and exchanging electronic patient data.
William Yasnoff, M.D., believes the model would provide financial incentives to office-based physicians for use of electronic health record systems, as well as give patients control over their health information. During the keynote address at Health Data Management's Clinical Automation Summit, he made the case for creation of local entities, or trusts, to build and operate health record banks to serve as a central repository for medical records information, paid for and controlled by patients.
The health records banks would charge account fees to individuals to collect their medical records from physicians, hospitals, pharmacies, insurers, labs and other sources; maintain the records and enable patients to determine who accesses it. A patient, for instance, could decide that their mental health history could not be accessible to non-mental health providers. Individual participation in the trusts would be voluntary.
Yasnoff, previously a senior advisor in the Department of Health and Human Services who worked on the concept of a national health information infrastructure, now is managing partner of NHII Advisors, an Arlington, Va.-based consulting firm.
He believes a per patient cost of $5 per month would be sufficient to build and maintain health records banks, and from those funds the banks also could pay physicians $3 per encounter to submit to their local health records bank-with patient consent-standardized clinical information. These payments could help fund physician implementation of EHRs or provide physicians with a remotely hosted system using an ASP model.
Additional stories from the summit are available online at healthdatamanagement.com. Complete coverage will be featured in an editorial supplement in the December edition.
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