Personal Health Records - My Views

I have lately seen a lot of debate on building patient centric databases and enabling the personal health records. Few of the questions that gets asked all the time are

1. Is PHR the future?
2. Will the consumer use this?
3. Will payer be able to differentiate based on their PHR offerings?
4. Like disease management is this something that payers will be forced to offer as a value to consumer?
5. How can you manage the integration complexities of getting data from various sources and keeping PHRs current?

I think these are all good questions to ask. I have seen trends in variation of the PHR itself. IHR - Individual Health record, PHR that is used internally by physicians and nurses instead of consumers. There is a fear on how far the PHR should make the clinical information transparent? Should the lab results be made avialable to Consumer directly? What if the information reaches the consumer before it reaches his physician? This might be the case going forward.

Irrespective of the impact and complexity I feel PHRs are here to stay. The level of adoption by consumers will be determinded by the content of the PHR and its relevance.

There are a few notable companies to watch out for in this space that are doing things a little differently from the traditional PHR implementations..

www.ingenix.com
www.icw-global.com
www.centrifyhealth.com

It will be interesting to see how this Industry evolves and plays out in the future.

Susheel Ladwa