Regarding "Big employers announce PHR project" in the
Dec. 6 edition of
Health IT Strategist:
The problems around this model are that patients do not
manage their data today -- physicians do. One of the
biggest reasons for this is that the patient data
reside with physicians. The primary reason for this is
technology, or lack thereof. Less than 10% of
physicians today use electronic medical records, thus
the majority of patient data live in a paper chart.
Even for the 10% that have an EMR solution today, these
solutions are not interconnected or integrated to
physicians and patients outside of their
practice/medical group. This means that for the most
part, the data are not retrievable.
Dossia only has the potential to be successful with
large healthcare groups who have made tremendous
investments in IT, such as Kaiser. Since physicians are
currently the record keepers, a patient-managed
personal health record will not be successful until
physicians adopt interoperable solutions. This has
been proven time and time again with PHR solutions that
continue to have low adoption rates, such as
RelayHealth and Medem.
Ryan Howard
Chief executive
officer
Practice Fusion
San Francisco
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