My Wireless Personal Health Record

Jack Mason, IBM Strategic Communications, HealthNex Producer

Back in October, IBM became one of the largest companies to announce it would make electronic personal health records available to its U.S. workforce.

Since the service (which is managed by our partners WebMD and Fidelity) launched, I've played around with it and managed to build out my PHR in about half an hour.  I'm also planning to build records out for my wife and son, since the service allows me to create PHRs for other family members.

I should note that the health record is only one feature in a broad suite of services that also include an interactive health wellness assessment, tools for tracking things like blood pressure, weight, exercise, and lots of news and resources such as ratings of different hospitals.

Of course, the chicken-and-egg question with electronic health records is that absent any automatic integration with electronic systems my doctor or hospitals use (and as far as I know, my primary care guy doesn't have any system for my record to interface with), how  useful or practical is my PHR, especially in an emergency?

The system does enable you to fax your health record to a provider, but that might not be very feasible in situations where I didn't have the time or Web access to get into the system and send my records. (For the record, I'm perfectly healthy and don't have any complicated medical history that would be vital for doctors to know in an emergency, but I appreciate how life-saving a PHR could be for other people, like my parents, with more age-related health issues.)

I've figured out two workarounds to keep my record at hand: first,  the WebMD system does allow you to export your health record as a PDF, which I have done and saved as an electronic document.  A health care provider could simply scan my record that way. I suppose I could also email it to someone who needed it, but that would also be inconvenient in a  time crunch.

About a month ago, I noticed that the service had some wireless settings in the preferences. It took some doing to set up, but I now can access my health record from my Blackberry. This wireless access enables me to email or fax my record from my handheld device, or simply share it directly with a health care professional  if necessary.

This wireless route is an imperfect solution for PHR accessibility-- in a broad societal emergency like Hurricane Katrina where almost all communications were down, my Blackberry might be operable.

But until the wider medical ecosystem develops an electronic infastructure for my electronic record to plug into, I think this wireless trick is a pretty nifty one.

What other ways can people be proactive to make their ePHRs useful in advance of a fully interoperable ehealth infrastructure?

IBMHealthNex

Comments

[abadi]

nice article

[Peter]

PHRs on flash drives are one way. Although, many of the consumer products I've seen which go this route are little more than glorified MedicAlert bracelets. These devices would be more helpful if there was a standard (HL7?) interface which could read them, and an intuitive way for front-office staff to get to the data.

Wireless/Web based seems like the better way to go if only because there's redundancy, and is totally portable. If Mt. Rainer essplodes and I'm forced to leave everything behind, I'd still be able to have the refugee camp workers access a remote server for my PHR.

The Blackberry thing is a neat trick though...

[Jack Mason]

Peter:

You raise an important point. The PHR has to have multiple digital pathways to be widely accesible. Look at the way in which email has become a fluid commodity. I can get mine--or at least my personal mail on any Web-connected computer, as well as handheld devices.

Maybe there is a simple, national level way that a patient could proactively make their record available to a qualified doctor or provider. I guess that's the gist of the National Patient ID debate.

But the simply truth is, what patient wouldn't want their record available in an emergency to any healthcare professional who could quickly lookup a patient's code and retrieve their hl7 compliant record.

[Bill Seitz]

Can't you just save the PDF on your Blackberry?

[Jack Mason]

Bill:

Good point. I can open word docs as very prmitive attachments with my BB--a 7750 model-- but haven'tried to email the PDF to myself. Will investigate and let you know.