The Public Face of HIT: Patient Portals and PHRs

By Joe Wivoda, Chief Information Officer

This is my second blog for National HIT Week, or as we are spelling it on Twitter, #NHITWeek (shameless plug: follow me @WivodaRural and The Center too @RHRC). Yesterday’s blog was really an introduction and short discussion of the concept of a national week dedicated to Health Information Technology (HIT). So exciting! So many opportunities for me to opine! So many late nights behind the keyboard! This time I want to discuss an HIT topic that we can all participate in as consumers.

There is no more important HIT topic to me right now than patient engagement. We have such a great opportunity now to start engaging patients in their own care by providing them with the data and information that we have locked up in our newly-installed electronic health records. Just about every industry you can think of does a better job of providing information to their customers. My car company provides a portal for the health of my car. My Honeywell thermostat even notifies me if my house gets too cold. One of the most data-rich industries in the history of human kind is just now providing patients with access to their health information.

I often hear that rural has unique challenges with providing patient portals or personal health records (I think these are separate, and I will explain why later) for a variety of reasons:

• “Our patients are older”
• “We have poor broadband out here”
• “Our patients just don’t want that information”

These things may indeed be true, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't work hard to provide access to those patients and their caregivers. Older patients likely have family that are involved in their care, and that family may not be close by. Cellular technology is putting the internet into the hands of more people in more places than ever before. Even if your patients say they don’t want it today, they will very soon.

I said yesterday that we are in the “bag phone” era for HIT. When cell phones were new, there were large areas of countryside where trying to use your new phone made about as much sense trying to plug your laptop into a currant bush. It just wasn't going to work! Our model for providing patients with their health information is not much different: locked up in proprietary silos that make scheduling appointments easy, communicating with providers difficult, and functions for exporting your data into a universally accepted form (C-CDA) obscure. Personal Health Records (PHRs) like Microsoft HealthVault allow you to take the information from the various patient portals that you may have and import the data to one location. The beauty of these PHRs is that many national providers, like pharmacy chains, can automatically send information to these portals. Sadly, so can just about any local hospital, clinic, or healthcare system. The hookup is free, but few take advantage of it today. My healthcare provider knows I prefer my health information to be in a PHR of my choice and I will keep asking them to support that (someday, hopefully, please?).

What is your assignment for today? Go get access to your health information from your clinic, hospital, pharmacy, or other provider. Already have access and enjoy “checking your own oil”? Then talk to someone in your family and have them sign up. If you are responsible for the patient portal at a health care provider, is it user friendly? Does it allow patients to download their information easily? Is it easy to contact providers directly?

Soon patients will be demanding better access to their information. This patient does. So should you. Let’s move from the bag-phone era to the coveted flip-phone soon. Now that reminds me, I need to order an iPhone 6…

P.S. Cue the foreboding music! Tomorrow's topic is usability in HIT. Everyone has an opinion on that, send me yours @WivodaRural!