It's all about improving health. It's about giving providers better, more comprehensive information. It's about empowering patients with better information to manage their health.
It's about enabling collaboration between patients and their physicians, and between physicians and other healthcare providers.
A PHR can provide an "evergreen" continuity of care record that has the significant benefit of improving the way care is provided with the potential to result in better patient outcomes. But we have not yet arrived. We're a long way from eClinical Nirvana, but with each step toward electronic health records we can achieve progress.
Link: Personal health records: What's the status now?
I just finished reading this interesting article, located on the Modern Medicine website. It clearly describes how PHRs have helped patients become more involved in their medical care, with real life case examples. People who have a PHR are able to:
- learn more about their clinical conditions
- help physicians avoid medication errors
- communicate with physicians
- request refills and determine when refills are needed
- print PHR data and provide it to their physician
So what are some of the benefits for patients? Better information about their clinical conditions and convenience. A comprehensive view of treatments, medications, etc. that can be shared with their doctor, regardless of where they are located.
There also seems to be a move to provide connectivity between a physician's electronic clinical records and the patient's electronic personal health records. The story described iHealth, an EHR for physicians that integrates with Google Health. Some providers, it says, will be wary of the challenges that may arise from an "educated" patient/healthcare consumer.
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