Plans for Microsoft's HealthVault, a Personal Health Record
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Joshua Schwimmer, MD, FACP, FASN
PHRs have the potential, at least in theory, to significantly improve communication between doctors, hospitals, and patients. The ideas is that patients and participating health providers can enter data into an online database. All the information in this database -- including allergies, medical conditions, medications, and laboratory results -- would be available to any provider who needed it. No more fumbling with handwritten lists of medications or calls to doctors offices to obtain a patients medical history. Ideally, all this information should be easily and securely available to any healthcare provider, anytime. (For an example of how this might work in the case of a patient presenting with a heart attack, see this article from the American Academy of Family Physicians.)
So far Microsoft has partnered with organizations including the American Health Association, Johnson & Johnson, LifeScan, the Mayo Clinic, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Microsoft is also working with medical device manufacturers allow information from devices to be uploaded directly to HealthVault. A diabetic, for example, could automatically have their glucose levels sent to their PHR, which would then be reviewed by their physician. (Currently, patients often bring handwritten blood pressure and glucose readings to the office -- automating the process would be a welcome advance.)
But truthfully, I know of few patients and doctors who use PHRs. The technology is too new, too few doctors and patients have heard of it, and the benefits of the technology are not worth the investment of time and money for many physician's practices, health systems, and patients.
All this may change and PHRs may be more widely adopted, especially if new services are offered. Dr. Bill Crounse, Microsoft's Health Director, spoke last year at a conference about "what consumer's want":
- On-line appointment scheduling
- Web messaging with physician and support staff
- Access to lab and radiology reports
- On-line prescription refills
- Reminders and "information therapy"
- Access to personal medical records
- Outcomes and disease management tools
(Also posted on The Efficient MD.)
Labels: google health, healthvault, microsoft, personal health record, phr
1 Comments:
At Mon Jan 28, 11:10:00 AM 2008,
Scott Smith said…
Jan. 28, 2008
Dear Dr. Schwimmer:
Director of Public Relations for MyMedicalRecords.com (“MMR”), I read with great interest Sunday's blog on electronic personal health records and HealthVault and thought you would find MMR of interest. MMR has contracts with organizations covering more than 30 million lives to provide our services.
Contrasting MMR to other popular EMR products, MMR is delivering the most user-friendly, convenient and versatile web-based Personal Health Record available today. Using our proprietary patent pending technologies, complete patient information including actual lab test results, radiology reports and images, progress notes and all of a patient’s charts can be uploaded or faxed with annotated voice notes and comments directly into the user’s password-secured account. Users do not need to install any special software or use any special hardware to use our service.
MMR also has integrated other advanced features, such as multilingual translation, a drug interaction database of more than 20,000 medications, calendaring for prescription refills and doctor appointments, and private voicemail for a doctor’s message and other personal uses.
There also is a special “Emergency Log-In” feature that allows a doctor to access a user’s account to view their most important medical information in the event of a medical emergency. To ensure individual privacy, specific data, such as prescriptions, allergies, blood type and copies of actual medical files or images, are pre-selected by the user for inclusion in the online read-only Emergency Folder.
In addition, MMR also includes an online ESafeDeposit Box feature that enables users to securely store any important document in a virtual “lock box” and access them anytime from anywhere using an Internet-connected computer or PDA. These documents can include Advanced Directives, Wills, insurance policies, birth certificates, photos of Family, Pets and Property, and more. MMR is clearly one of the most complete user-friendly Personal Health Records available today (I could email you a comparison chart).
I would encourage you to visit MMR and set up a complimentary account. Simply go to www.mymedicalrecords.com and sign up using registration code MMRBLOG. I would be interested in your experience and hope that you will include us in any further discussions of Personal Health Records. I could also send you more information by email or snail mail (the latter allows me to send a bit more than I’d want to clog your email with). Recently, we sent out a release about MMR Pro, which will better enable physicians to put patient records into secure, online accounts.
Sincerely,
Scott S. Smith
Director of Public Relations
MyMedicalRecords.com
11000 Santa Monica Blvd. #430
Los Angeles CA 90067
888/808-4667
Ext 123 (Cell: 310/254-4051)
ssmith@mmrmail.com
Encl.
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