Personal health records for Chief Information Officers
Table of contents
- 1. Financial
- 2. Clinical
- 3. Technical
- 4. Legal
- 5. Further reading
Hospital senior leaders must understand personal health records (PHRs) and they must act strategically. As CIO your peers and CEO will look to you for that understanding. The more you demonstrate your grasp of the opportunity and its risks the more prominent your role will be as a strategic leader within the enterprise. This page provides 360 analysis of the technology.
Financial
The costs of deployments have plummeted in recent years for a number of reasons:
- Many hospitals have already made the costly investment in electronic health records (EHRs) software to store clinicians' documentation, as well as digitizing laboratory, pathology and radiology test results. Displaying that digital information to patients is a fraction of the cost, requiring only a web server that is outside the hospital firewall, integration software that pulls in all the data feeds, and a user interface that is for the tasks of patients rather than clinicians.
- The change management is cheaper because more doctors have come to accept the advantages, and inveitability, of sharing information with patients.
- The burdens of change management are borne by broad-based coalition rather than individual institutional champions. These include employer-led efforts like those of Dossia because they tell employees about the benefits of PHRs; consumer internet companies like Google and Microsoft because they make free PHR tools that integrate into the other tools that patients are already comfortable using; the simultaneous integration of prestigious hospitals' EHRs with the data stores of these internet companies' PHRs.
- Widespread acceptance and adoption of data standards is finally here, reducing the custom software that has to be written for each deployment.
Clinical
PHRs deployments must be led by clinicians, even as they rely on heavy support from the CIO. This is because deploying PHRs affects how clinicians work and success is only possible when clinicians integrate the technology into their interactions with patients.
Technical
There are two dominant standards for PHRs: the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) and the Continuity of Care Document (CCD). The CCR standard is the simpler of the two, came first, and is in widening use (see blog post by Dr. David Kibbe). The CCR is standard to use.
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