Last week I posted a poll asking how many readers of EMR and HIPAA used a PHR. Here’s the results of the PHR poll:
Pretty interesting to see that about 77% of those voting have not started a PHR or started one, but didn’t add much to their PHR. I guess I’m not all that surprised since I fall into that category as well. The scary thing is that this is coming from people who are in the healthcare and healthcare IT industry. If we’re not using a PHR, then I’d imagine that the number of PHR users outside of the industry is even smaller.
I’m still considering the compelling PHR use case since the results from this PHR poll says that one hasn’t shown its face yet. However, I must admit that the more I research and read about PHR and some of the possibilities, the more potential I can see in the PHR. Although, I also believe it won’t likely look like what most people call a PHR today.
Now for this week’s poll about reader’s approach to the EHR stimulus money. This should have some interesting results since I’ve added the time frame people plan to apply for the EHR incentive money as well.
Most of us expect to see our bank records in real time and never enter our own data into quicken or mint from multiple sources – it just imports it automatically. Until 1) docs get an EMR and then 2) allow patients to export the data into a PHR’s they won’t really take off.. 3) Entering your own data into the PHR will not blow back into the doc’s EMR (your cash transactions don’t show up in the bank records either)
People who are lucky enough to have doctors at Kaiser or Group health have full access to their medical records via a patient portal but that is hard to duplicate using an EHR linked to a PHR.
Even at Kaiser if you get some of your care outside of the system it doesn’t show up in the same way as the rest of your clinical records do..
@Cascadia,
My question is even if you could get your patient data from your doctors’ EMR software, would you do it? Chronic patients certainly have a reason to do it. I’m not sure that many generally healthy individuals would. I think there needs to be some other motivation than just aggregate records.
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