standards for personal health records

Standards for Personal Health Records

In my post about Personal Health records , I identified the 4 major

types of Personal Health records - provider-hosted, payer-based,

employer-sponsored and commercial. As more products are offered, it's

key that all the stakeholders involved embrace national healthcare

data standards to ensure interoperability of the data placed in

personal health records.

To illustrate the point, I am posting my entire lifelong medical

record on my blog (this is with my consent, so there are no HIPAA

issues) in two ways.

The first is a PDF which was exported from a leading electronic health

record system. It's 77 pages long and contains a mixture of clinical

data, administrative data, normal and abnormal results, numeric

observations, and notes. It's a great deal of data, but is very

challenging to understand, since it does not provide an organized view

of the key elements a clinician needs to provide me ongoing care. It

is not semantically interoperable, which means that it cannot be read

by computers to offer me or my doctors the decision support that will

improve my care.

The second is a Continuity of Care Document , using the national

Health Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) interoperability

specifications. It uses "Web 2.0" approaches, is XML based, machine

and human readable, and uses controlled vocabularies enabling

computer-based decision support.

It's critical that Vendors, Payers, Providers and Employers embrace

these standards. A standards-based personal health record can be used

to prevent medication errors, ensure best practice disease prevention,

and serve as the basis for decision support systems which recommend

optimal care. Using CCD, data can be turned into wisdom , can be

incorporated into EHRs, transmitted between PHRs, and can be easily

expanded by the patient throughout life.

Today (December 13), HITSP will deliver the harmonized standards for

Personal Health Records, Labs, Emergency Records, and Quality

measurement to HHS Secretary Leavitt. These "interoperability

specifications" will become part of Federal contacting language and be

incorporated into vendor system certification criteria (CCHIT) over