Independent Health Record Banks

The following idea was proposed in IBM's InnovationJam, one of our goundbreaking global brainstorming events.  The InnovationJam is currently happening, over a period of 72 hours, on IBM's intranet.  InnovationJam is the first time we've extended this collaborative experience beyond employees to their family members, some of our business partners and other external participants including universities.  InnovationJam features forum discussion on "Going Places," "Staying Healthy," "Finance and Commerce," and "A Better Planet."  As you can imagine, some great conversations on the personalization of medicine, electronic health records, pandemic preparation, and managing healthcare costs are underway.  We want to spotlight one of the most innovative ideas to come out of the discussion thus far: Independent Health Record Banks.

Amnon Shabo (Shvo), Healthcare and Life Sciences, IBM Research Lab in Haifa

In a nutshell, the model of Independent Health Banks suggests that medical records will not be kept anymore by healthcare providers; rather they will be sustained for the entire lifetime of an individual by new players in the healthcare industry- "Independent Health Records Banks" which will be (1) independent of healthcare providers / insurers / government-agencies and (2) regulated by new legislation.

The fundamental principle of the new legislation is that the copy of a medical record stored in such an EHR bank is the only medico-legal copy. The record is sustained objectively by an EHR bank and all authorized parties can have access to it. Such a bank acts as a custodian/trustee. Multiple competing banks will be established by private enterprises (once the appropriate legislation will be in place), much like financial banks.

Healthcare providers could reduce their costs of medical records archiving as this function will be carried out by the EHR banks. Insurers will support it as it will improve the quality of care their customers get. Privacy will be better protected as no global patient identifiers will be needed since a bank account number will be the only access key that the individual needs.

And most importantly, true longitudinal EHRs will finally come out of the raw attested medical records by advanced information technologies employed by the EHR banks.
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A more detailed description of this vision is available in the follwoing papers:
* Shabo, A., Vortman V. and Robson B. (2001). Who’s Afraid of Lifetime Electronic Medical Records? In proceedings of TEHRE – Towards Electronic Health Records Conference, London, UK, November 2001. Available online at http://www.haifa.ibm.com/projects/softwa...
* Shabo, A. (2006). A Global Socio-Economic-Medico-Legal Model for the Sustainability of Longitudinal Electronic Health Records. Methods of Information in Medicine 3/2006: 240-245.

IBM HealthNex Electronic Health Records Independent Health Banks

Comments

[Shahid N. Shah]

I like the idea of banks and I think the another analogy is that of a credit bureau. I wrote about the concept of a "Central Bank" for healthcare on my blog last year at http://www.healthcareguy.com/index.php/archives/102. Keep up the good work.

[Jack Mason]

Shahid:

Good to hear from you! One of the fundamental challenges here is the credibility of the institution. The kinds of companies that provide EMRs or PHRs today certainly don't have the kind of established credibility for people to entrust what is the digital equivalent of their lives to them.

So I think if such HealthBanks do emerge, some of what will be needed is a kind of FDIC or federally blessed mandate, protection and support.

I also wonder if these organizations actually will have to have physical branches so that consumers will be able to feel like there's a there there.

[Shahid N. Shah]

Good points, Jack. I think you and I are on the same page with this and I got some good (private) feedback on my column about health banks when I wrote about them back in December. I'm thinking you and I could setup a conference call for a small group to discuss the matter and see if we could brainstorm some ideas to make it happen.

[ClickRich]

Great idea. I fear that the funding of such Banks might infer association with one or more of the organisations which you rightly excluded from running such institutions.

[Jennifer]

Some people prefer to keep their medical records private. won't this give insurers access to these records.
go-advise.com has lots of advice on all health issues.

[Matthew Holt]

Note exactly a new idae, but one who's time has come. Meanwhile time to fix the comment spam filter!

[William Yasnoff, MD, PhD]

A Coalition to promote Health Record Banking has now been organized (see http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=5535 and http://www.healthbanking.org ). Hopefully, this will focus more attention on this terrific idea.

[health]

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[Daniel Castro]

A new report out by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) on the benefit of health record data banks (or independent health record data trusts).

Link here http://www.itif.org/files/HealthIT.pdf