Interoperable solutions are needed to allow patients to manage their data

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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