Health plan pushing personal medical records

A Connecticut HMO believes that the way to get its members to create online personal records is with their physicians.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Feb. 27, 2006.

ConnectiCare, a Farmington, Conn.-based health plan, is launching an initiative to get its members to create online personal health records for themselves and their families.

Under the initiative, ConnectiCare plans to offer a discounted subscription fee to all in-network physicians to get them to sign up for the iHealthRecord service from Medem, a San Francisco-based company partly owned by the AMA.

Using the service, health plan members will be able to create a comprehensive, secure Web-based medical record, giving their regular doctor access to information about care they received from other physicians and hospitals that normally isn't readily accessible to them, said Stephen Jewett, a ConnectiCare spokesman.

ConnectiCare, which soon will promote the online service to the more than 10,000 physicians who treat its 240,000 members, hasn't determined yet how much doctors will pay for the iHealthRecord service. But the monthly fee will be "nominal," Jewett said. ConnectiCare is paying iHealthRecord $20 per physician for the subscriptions.

Since Medem launched iHealthRecord in May 2005, nearly 5,000 physicians have purchased iHealth services, which also include practice Web site and secure e-mail services, said Edward Fotsch, MD, Medem's CEO.