Personal Health Record

What is it?

A Personal Health Record (PHR) is an electronic resource containing clinical information necessary for people to be able to make decisions with regards to their health. A common feature of the PHR platforms that I have consulted is the accessibility that the patient has to a certain amount of relevant information from his/her medical records (hospital admission reports, emergency reports, lab results, etc.) Additionally there are other remarkable characteristics of PHR, not featured or adopted by all the platforms:

• Scheduling doctor, nursing and test appointments.
• Self-monitoring of relevant variables: blood glucose, blood pressure, physical activity, calorific intake, weight, etc. The patient is responsible for maintaining this element of the PHR. It is very useful for ‘at-risk’ and chronic patients.
• Medication control and prescription management.
• Access to radiology images. This is a technically sophisticated function often still under development.
• Secure messaging Mailbox to connect with the healthcare team. See post "E–mail: it starts showing results"
• Managing insurance policy (only American PHR).

Three American PHR

 

E–mail: it starts showing results

Although the health system is advancing very slowly compared to other industries, I'm sure that people are ready to adopt online services and that the health care system is able to open new lines of communication in accordance with the times we live in. Success is guaranteed, provided that the professionals are willing to adapt, and this is the hard part. No wonder the banking offices and travel agencies, to take two examples, have had to redefine, from head to toe, their business models, thanks to or because of online services.

In this review of a scientific evidence program (in the scanned blue cover), the Department of Veterans Affairs in the U.S. asks the following question: What is the association between 'safe' e-mail and clinical outcomes, the patients satisfaction, the treatment adherence and the efficiency or the resource use?

But first, if I may, I’ll clarify the issue of ‘safe’ e-mail because I think it is relevant. For obvious reasons of security and confidentiality, whenever we speak of using electronic messaging to communicate between a patient and their doctor or nurse, one has to do it through a protected access, which for now is the platform of shared clinical record.