We held a public webcast on this topic today. Susannah Fox, Associate Director of the Pew Internet Project, not only shared valuable insights but also some of Pew’s as-yet-unpublished data. The presentations and the audio recording from both of our presentations will be available on our Web site in the near future.

We had nearly 100 unique logons to the webcast and more than 25 questions, so we didn’t have time to answer all of them. Over the next few days, I’ll try to answer questions we didn’t get to and elaborate on a few that I have been thinking about for various reasons. Also, Susannah Fox will post comments on this blog (as time allows) as well…although I’m sure that you’ll need to tune in to her upcoming Pew reports (available at www.pewinternet.org) to get all her insightful thoughts.

Q: Why can’t we have a way for doctors to upload my personal health records to a private page on a social network site that I can then share with other providers or people in my community?

JJS thoughts: This is a great idea, and clearly an activity that would support a much more collaborative care environment that would help improve (to paraphrase Dartmouth’s John Wasson) “same-page care” (getting clinicians and their patients on the same page). Unfortunately, there has been little progress in this arena outside of some integrated delivery systems (perhaps Group Health Cooperative in Seattle being the most advanced example). Some of the organizations that Wasson works with through a couple of innovative initiatives (see www.howsyourhealth.org and www.idealmicropractice.org) are getting at this in different ways as well.

No doubt part of the reason is that an infrastructure doesn’t exist to support it, and we’re working on two aspects of that infrastructure. First, we need to address the consumer-facing side of IT interoperability so that we can effectively connect consumers to health content that they can make sense of. I wrote an Issue Brief for the California Health Care Foundation about this issue (see “Lost in Translation: Consumer Health Information in an Interoperable World” at http://www.chcf.org/topics/view.cfm?itemID=114624).

The second infrastructure piece that we are trying to address is the payer side of the equation by creating technical specifications to define what constitutes Ix. The goal of our Ix Payer Workgroup is to provide guidance to pay-for-performance, provider recognition, and other programs so that they can recognize when providers, organizations, or tools provide people with information that supports their information needs with respect to decision support, behavior change, or other health needs.

I’ll address other questions tomorrow and in the days ahead.

–Josh

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 6th, 2007 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Health 2.0 Space, Market Rewards/Reimbursement Issues, PHRs, Standards Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.