Consultant: Prepare for PHRs

HDM Breaking News, November 12, 2007

Patients will demand personal health records, so health care organizations should be preparing technology and privacy models now, a consultant specializing in emerging technologies says.

“Up until now, there’s been a lot of talk but very little progress with PHRs,” says Web Rishel, research vice president at Gartner, a Stamford, Conn.-based consulting firm. But he predicts that PHRs will become more common because of public demand, and providers will eventually feed data to a handful of major third-party PHR initiatives, such as Microsoft’s new Health Vault.

For PHRs to succeed, he argues, organizations must devise ways to separate the data in PHRs from the “health management tools” that patients use for such tasks as managing their diseases. Rishel’s other advice for providers includes:

* Embrace the use of cellular phones to provide services to patients. For example, he points to phones now in development that include a glucometer or display EKG results.

* Prepare to support home monitoring of patients.

* Connect bedside medical devices in hospitals to electronic health records to ease the gathering of timely data.

* Use Service Oriented Architecture as a key element of all systems integration efforts.

Rishel made his comments November 12 at the Gartner Healthcare Summit 2007.

For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:

• Consumer Health
• Data Security
• Electronic Health Records
• Hospitals
• Group Practices