FREE Health Data Management Site Registration

Sign up today and access the leading source of Health Care I.T. information on the Web.
Your FREE site registration entitles you to:

Free Health Data Management e-newsletter
 
Search more than 12,000 articles
 
Access Web Seminars on a host of I.T. topics
 
White Papers and Industry Research that provide valuable insights on a variety of technologies and implementation issues
 
Podcasts, updates on industry events, and much more!

 
   

Payer Experiments With 3 PHRs


September 5, 2008

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts is experimenting with three models for personal health records and waiting to see which one takes off.

The plan recently took the plunge and became the first payer to sign up to use the Google Health PHR platform from the Mountain View, Calif.-based search engine giant. Earlier this year, it also began offering enrollees My Blue Health on its Web site, in collaboration with WebMD, New York. This includes a PHR and other resources, such as personalized health assessments. And it's also working with an employer group that's launching its own PHR.

"There are a lot of vendors in this space, and we want to see where people go," says Steven Fox, vice president of provider network management for the Boston-based payer.

Fox portrays My Blue Health as a payer-based PHR, while Google Health is more of an independent effort with multiple stakeholders. "We really wanted to get to a truly independent model like Google," Fox says. "Who better to help us learn what consumers want than a company like Google?"

Across the country, a growing number of payers are jumping on the PHR bandwagon in hopes of controlling costs and improving quality through better access to information, says Pat Kennedy, president of PJ Consulting, a Rockville, Md.-based consulting firm that advises payers. "The industry can't afford to wait for the provider community to get electronic health records," he contends. A PHR with claims data and consumer-entered data is a good starting point, he believes.

To read the Payers department from the September issue of Health Data Management, which takes a close look at the Blues plan's strategy, click here.

Consumer Health Archive
Health Information Exchange Archive
Payers Archive

I.T. Spotlights