Who Will Be the Next Generation of PHR Users?
By Josh Seidman | Popularity: 31%Looking at how young people use the Web for virtually everything from commerce to social networking, it’s not hard to imagine an increasingly virtual future health care world. If Don Berwick is right that at least half of current in-person clinical encounters don’t require a visit, this generation likely will change the character of US health care delivery.
But what about the other end of the chronological spectrum? One of the common questions I get is how we make information therapy (Ix) relevant for seniors–the population that consumes the greatest amount of health care.
Although part of the answer is that Ix need not be delivered electronically, the more compelling notion from my perspective is that we have a magnificent and mostly untapped opportunity to extend patient-centered health information technology (HIT) applications to people who really need them.
The potential of the innovative applications that comprise patient-centered HIT (e.g., personal health records (PHRs), secure messaging, online tools, etc.) can be maximized if we successfully integrate them into patient-clinician relationships. Ideally, they should be viewed as tools within that context.
More than anybody else, seniors are likely to have ongoing and frequent relationships with their clinicians. In fact, in many cases, seniors concurrently interact with multiple providers, making the need for coordinated relationship management tools all the more important. Without them, we wind up with considerable redundancy, poor communication (not just between patient and doctor but among providers involved in that person’s care), and the possibility for dangerous medical errors.
Furthermore, other characteristics more common as people age (e.g., limited mobility, cognitive functioning issues) increase the importance of having patient-centered HIT applications. They can allow for communication without patient and clinician needing to be in the same place and for communication to be trianglulated–for example, to include the child or spouse of a senior with cognitive impairment.
Many seniors are already accessing considerable health care information online (to some, a surprising percentage), and there’s no doubt that the aging baby boomer population will vastly expand the online senior population in the near future. However, there’s no reason why we can’t do more to help more seniors capitalize on this golden opportunity now.
Community efforts involving librarians, hospital community outreach staff, senior centers, and others can effectively break down barriers limiting seniors’ adoption of e-health resources. Although I haven’t seen a lot of empirical data, anecdotal evidence suggests that, once obstacles are removed, seniors become active Internet users.
Who do you think the next generation of PHR users will be?
–Josh
(Visit www.ixcenter.org for more about PHRs and related issues.)
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March 20th, 2007 at 1:55 am
As a physician and founder of PassportMD, Inc. (http://www.PassportMD.com ) , I remain committed to creating a free site and service so that people of any age and any economic status can participate. The free service helps people through the often-tedious process of creating a very valuable, and potentially life saving tool, the personal health record. We are committed to simplifying this process, giving people, seniors, adults, children, particularly with a history of at least one chronic medical disease, on multiple medications, or with a history of allergies access to a system that can help save their lives. Doctors need to have access to reliable information that is legible and accessible and PassportMD provides this needed function.
Medical Mistakes are common, hospital errors are responsible for over 100,000 deaths per year and these could be preventable. Information about drug interactions and cross reactivity combined with allergy alerts lead the way in being critical to every healthcare provider before initiating care. At PassportMD.com we have created a very easy way to solicit this information from individuals and host it so that they may access it or print it off in times of need at no charge and as often as they would like.
Scenarios where this type of service makes the most sense is baby boomers that are responsible for managing their elderly parents’ medical care and doctors’ visits, or seniors that live alone or are responsible for managing their own care and visits to their doctors. Or, “snowbirds” that share many doctors between more than one state would benefit from PassportMD.com. Alternatively, children, before they go to summer camp, if they have an allergy or take chronic medications for chronic problems. Anyone with any chronic disease, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, for example would benefit from the free PassportMD.com service. Additionally, active, healthy individuals that are pro-active with their health in preparation for unexpected and unpredictable medical problems would benefit from PassportMD.com. People that travel frequently, cruise to the islands, or boat, would be especially susceptible to medical emergencies without their accurate medical history.
The doctors are very slowly adopting electronic health records. This adoption is way too slow and is very complicated. It has many factors in play as it relates to the economics of medicine. Although privacy is considered an issue, the true issue is cost, implementation and maintanence costs to the physician practice are too burdensome in light of decreasing reimbursement. Thus, only 7.5 % of physician practices are currently adopting electronic health records. Though, if you poll the remaining 92.5% of physicians, probably all would agree that electronic health records are better for medicine and for the patient. Adoption is inevitable but the pace and time period for adoption is dependent upon many factors.
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:49 am
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