Patient Centric Health Records, A Case for the Clinical Setting

This paper was written for my Medical Informatics class at OHSU
Personally Controlled Health Records which are also know as Patient-Centric Health Record (PCHRs), a subset of Personal Health Records (PHRs), enable a patient to assemble, maintain and manage a secure copy of his or her medical data. PCHRs provide Patient-Centric online tools that are managed by the patient and are viewed as the enabler of Patient Centric Healthcare. This paper will discuss the advantages of utilizing the Patient Centric Health Record to facilitate Patient-Centric care in the clinical setting. There have been many articles written about the lack of ROI (Return On Investment) associated with PCHRs. This article provides information on achieving ROI by practicing Patient-Centric care that incorporates the Patient-Centric Health Record.

Case in point of a demonstrable use of a PHR is the Veterans Administration PHR utilized to assist veterans in management of their healthcare. MyHealtheVet.com has the largest participation of a PHR to date with 976K registered users. Of the registered users, over 10% have entered their own data to their record at the time of the publishing of this paper.

With the changes in the law-governing healthcare (e.g., ARRA, HITOC) and the definition of Meaningful Use there is more emphasis on the use and benefits of Patient-Centric healthcare. The delivery of healthcare is also quickly changing to meet new requirements of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) rulings. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is not directly stating PHCR/PHR are part of the requirements to date, but it is clear that there is a desire for Patient-Centric HIT as part of the overall plan. PCHR/PHR are the tools that provide solutions to achieve the ONC’s goals and fulfill their requirements.

Transparent commercial and Open Source Patient-Centric architectures, which are based on open standards have been developed and deployed to encourage widespread participation by patients, families, healthcare providers, caregivers and institutions, thus creating the ecosystem for development of innovative, consumer-focused and provider friendly healthcare applications. This paper shall illustrate that a PCHR/PHR has a value proposition for the clinical setting.

http://motionphr.com/pch_setting.pdf