I don’t have Portals and PHR’s quite figured out yet for my Health System, and based on the feedback I’m receiving from other CIO’s many of us don’t have it figured out yet. There are a lot of hospitals and physician groups in the market for Patient Portals and Personal Heath Record solutions to address the upcoming HITECH requirements. While the market is maturing and there are tremendous products out there I believe there is a fundamental question that everyone is, or should be, wrestling with. Do we deliver a patient portal / PHR solution directly to our customers/patients or do we collaborate with our competitors and provide a community solution?
From a patient standpoint I want to have access to as much of my medical information as possible. I should not have to login to multiple portals to retrieve and update this information if I visit providers that are unaffiliated with one another. If I am forced to move from one provider to another, I do not want to abandon my information or be challenged with manually transferring information to my new provider’s portal / PHR. Patients want their data to be secure, but don’t want providers to build walls around it and never let it out.
From a hospital or physician group perspective I want to deliver rich content to patients, ensure we are the easiest provider to deal by allowing appointment requests, patient to provide secure communication and other valuable services. Many of these features are specific to my organization and do not lend themselves well to a shared service with competitors.
While we already were testing different PHR’s and Portals we reset our efforts at the end of last year to start to address these questions. We have formulated an “E-Patient committee” that includes physicians, medical records, Information Systems, Security and just recently we have invited patients to participate. The intent is to really listen to what our customers really want and try to match that desire as closely as possible without confusing them by presenting a new system at differing locations. Additionally I will be approaching our Beacon Community partners to see how we might collectively collaborate around the PHR / Portal space to make sure that our community can benefit from a collaborative discussion around patient centric electronic information. This won’t be the easy way to address the HITECH incentive, but it is the right way for the patient.
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