The burgeoning growth of Personal health record market has also created confusion among users about various terms that are used in Health Information Technology.

For eg:Personal Health Record,Electronic Medical Record,Electronic Health Record,Personal Health Application,portable digital health record and also various prefix like I-record,my-record,your-record.
Although Markle and AHIMA have tried to offer various definitions for personal health record,yet these are not consensus definitions used world wide.It has been high time that some organization attempts to create a standard.

The National Alliance for Health Information Technology will launch next week a project to help eliminate confusion in the national discussion about health IT adoption by helping define health IT’s most commonly used – and misused – terms.
The industry-led Alliance is shepherding a five-month long project to define, vet and deliver to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONCHIT) consensus definitions for electronic health record (EHR), electronic medical record (EMR), personal health record (PHR), health information exchange (HIE) and regional health information organization (RHIO).
Jane Horowitz, the Alliance’s vice president and chief marketing officer, has rightly said “The question is, are we really speaking the same language and using the same terminology,” she said. “But then it becomes how do you start talking to consumers in a way they can understand what we’re trying to do in terms of the whole national structure of health IT.”

When you have many definitions of the same entity in the market,the confusion among consumers will definitely detest them from using them appropriately.For eg: in a internal survey by Mezocore, they found that majority of the general public were not aware of the term Personal health record.Moreover,many in the general public presume that it is something similar to a paper based medical record that they can carry along.The term personal health record does not even closely resemble anything to do with electronic or digital storage of health record according to general public current thought.

Until,a common definition is adopted by all the various manufactures of personal health record products,it is very difficult to convince the consumers to utilize them in their every day lives.The next important step will be to discuss about the privacy and security of these information and utilize them in their every day lives. Perhaps the manufacturers should study online medical billing courses to understand the intricacies of medical records. This will help in future security of Health Records.

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Here is my view published in BMJ as a response to article by Claudia Pagliari, Don Detmer, and Peter Singleton on Potential of electronic personal health records published BMJ 2007; 335: 330-333

Pagliari, Detmer and Singleton’s article on the potential of electronic personal health records (EHRs) is timely but this also raises some fundamental questions.First where are the data stored ? and then who actually controls these data? Patients who create and finally control their health data through personal health records either in online or off line method can restrict the viewing of their records to their own physicians and if they have any malicious data,they can erase it completely.Despite the presence of audit trailing, it is not yet a fool proof method to keep track of all changes to the health data.Moreover,physicians who access these records may be overwhelmed by presence of extensive record of personal health data by some patients.To isolate the good,bad and not useful data may be a tedious task for physicians and health care professionals in future.Next question is where are the data stored,is it in a secure server and if so for how long will the data be stored-life time of a patient or beyond?Can these data be used for research purpose or statistical analysis?

Despite these concerns,personal health record have an useful role to play in health care management.Adopting technologies in health care will significantly reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of health care delivery.Over prescription of medications,duplication of tests and lack of sharing of medical information among health care service providers has resulted in increased cost of health care in the current era.To improve the effectiveness of economic resources in area of health care, there is a need for fundamental changes in health care industry,although these changes cannot be done dramatically over the period of couple of years,but could be accomplished in the future.

Electronic Personal Health Record may be the first step towards enabling change in health care industry.

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