Marion Ball, Fellow in IBM's Center for Healthcare Management, IBM Business Consulting Services
Last week IBM and eight other major IT industry companies announced their commitment to adopt electronic personal health records (PHRs) for their 800,000+ U.S. employees. And today IBM is rolling out its first-generation PHR system for IBMers in the United States.
As it happened, I was also working in Washington last week on PHR issues,at a conference called Connecting Americans to Their Health Care: Empowered Consumers, Personal Health Records and Emerging Technologies.
Here's a quick summary of this excellent event, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Markle Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Keynote speaker Newt Gingrich sounded key themes that ran throughout the day:
National security demands that we have electronic health records (EHRs) for every American by next year to respond to disasters like Katrina, pandemics like the Avian flu, and biological or other terrorists attacks. The cost of EHRs may be high, but it is dwarfed by the downside costs of such disasters. Consider the dual-purpose of past projects, such as the interstate highway system built during the Cold War to evacuate Americans from cities demonstrate.
Fed Ex, eBay, Google and Travelocity are not the future. They are the present. In Korea, a diabetic patient can use a cell phone to test their blood sugar and transmit the results where they need to go.
The term "personal health knowledge system" is more accurate than "personal health record" because it is not just about digitizing paper, but about much, much more.
We need to get past resistance to such a system by making it voluntary and allowing Americans to adopt it.
Gingrich called for setting up the rules of the game: The PHR belongs to the individual, though physicians and hospitals may have copies; the owner of the PHR always knows who accesses the PHR and who entered what data; it is illegal for insurers or employers to use the PHR; it is slander for anyone to make the PHR public.
Two of the main challenges now are: system
interoperability so we can utilize our data in urgent situations, and a bill to protect citizen rights.
The luncheon keynoter, Eric
Dishman, General Manager of Intel's Health Research and Innovation
Group, reported on Intel's pioneering research on home health
technologies for families struggling with cognitive decline, cancer,
and cardiovascular disease since 1999. He and his staff live with the
families to discover what their needs really are and how they really
do cope, and then use existing technologies to support them in their
activities of daily living. Current work is on in-home sensor
networks technologies.
A final summary session highlighted some common themes that had emerged. Among them:
The technology is here. Even the futuristic-looking video from the Intel project uses existing technologies already widely available.
PHRs vary widely. Interoperability is critical to allowing them to be populated by data from various sources and to travel with consumers as they change health plans and physicians. We are not there yet.
Katrina gave us a "teaching moment." Making records electronic is essential to our national security as we face the possibility of Avian flu, terrorist attacks, or a California earthquake.
For more information, check out an archived webcast of the conference and related online resources.
I am happy to hear americans are being connected to health care. Health insurance is a major aspect to many.
Posted by: Blue Cross of California | November 25, 2005 at 04:30 PM