The problem: a caregiver needs to know your medical history, but your patient records are scattered with many individual providers. Your dermatologist has some of your medication history and knows you have an allergic reaction to penicillin. Your urologist has the lab results from a creatinine test done on your blood from a year ago. And your primary care physician has a ten-year history of your weight, vitals, and overall health.
How do you bring them together? (Other than with a hailstorm of faxes?)
Enter the PHR, the personal health record. The PHR takes a step to address this problem by creating a place for all your medical history (allergies, medications, encounters, etc.) to be stored. Best of all, you own it and manage it. Many products (Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, etc.) are being raced to market in the hopes of being the place where you deposit this information. Let's face it, the first place you put it will probably be the place your history stays since you won't want to move your information once you put it there.
An important feature of a PHR allows you to grant access to caregivers not only to view your health information, but also to add to it in a structured fashion. The information systems that your hospital, your physician, and your other caregivers use (such as Epic, Meditech, eClinicalWorks, GE Centricity, etc.) will have interfaces to your PHR to do this, or will through a health information exchange (HIE). The individual contributions of each of these providers will accumulate in your PHR and form a much more complete picture of our medical histories.
In my opinion, putting the right information in the hands of your caregivers is the best use of information technology for improving the health of people, and for improving outcomes.
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