EMR 2015: An evolving concept

Personal health records could give doctors better access to a patient's medical history.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. May 9, 2005.

About 60% of Americans want a personal health record. President Bush wants all Americans to have one. But what in blazes is in a PHR? And what are you supposed to do when patients ask for one?

The concept of a PHR is evolving, but the Connecting for Health task force in 2003 defined a PHR as an Internet-based set of tools that allow patients to access and coordinate their lifelong health information and make appropriate parts of it available to those who need it.

A PHR generally is understood to be an online record patients create and own and "is a subset of all the electronic medical records of all the places that they have ever been," said David Garets, CEO of HIMSS Analytics, a market research company owned by the Chicago-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. This differs from the electronic medical record of today, which is the information system that doctors and hospitals install in their offices, and the legal record that they, not the patient, own, he said.

The lack of a standard definition, combined with the lack of physician adoption of EMR software systems, have kept PHRs grounded. Other major stumbling blocks to widespread adoption include professional liability and privacy and security concerns.

But since President Bush set the goal of electronic personal health records for all Americans as part of his effort to build a national health information network within 10 years, PHRs have hit the headlines and have been discussed at national health care information technology conferences.