Today's winning comment comes from Brad Garland, from our post Health Care at SXSW - Health Getting Hot With Tech Crowd. Brad asked an open question: "Why can't we do an OpenEMR system like we are doing for authentication (OpenID). Be able to transfer and control your medical record personally instead of having the doctors control it all?"
I'm all in favor of this, as my twitter musings this morning attest. The Web could be a prime enabler of giving the user (i.e. us!) control over our medical records.
Congratulations Brad, you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.
Here is Brad's full comment:
"I was actually in this session as well and a thought kept creeping up in my head. Why can't we do an OpenEMR system like we are doing for authentication (OpenID). Be able to transfer and control your medical record personally instead of having the doctors control it all?
Speaking with Tantek Celik afterwards his thought was that there is nothing we can do in this society since it is controlled by big business & government. But I think it can still be overcome. It might take the right people in the right places but decentralizing this network and giving the power for each American to control their own medical record could ensure higher reliability, less poor diagnoses, and can handle scale."
Image credit: integritas
Comments
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Brad hit the nail on the head. As long as the SIGs for healthcare insurance companies keep buying votes on Capitol Hill, progress on the healthcare front will continue to be slow. Same thing with Telecom lobbyists and their ability to hinder American's progress toward super-high speed (gigabit) Internet access at a reasonable price.
BTW - I posted an interesting article a few weeks ago about the latter here:
Posted by: Jcyreus | March 17, 2008 6:42 AM(http://jcyreus.com/blog/2008/02/23/the-corrosive-influence-of-telecom-lobbyists/)
Unfortunately, technology isn't the gating factor. Health care providers guard patient records like other organizations guard client lists. We've explored it relatively extensively, and the work to be done seems to be very much on a buy-in level. Each medical institution needs to cooperate to make it successful, but a top-down approach doesn't seem to be working (the large hospital networks are the most competitive.) There's a reason Google started with a single clinic.
Posted by: Aaron | March 17, 2008 8:38 AMThis is exactly the idea behind Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault.
What you're talking about is known as a Personal Health Record. This is currently made available either through your insurance provider like Blue Cross Blue Shield (they know your claims history, so they also know your medical history), your doctor directly through his EMR system (although this is rarely available), and standalone third-parties like WebMD, Google, and Microsoft.
Google and Microsoft are important because they have enough clout to inspire major EMR providers to integrate with them.
Third-party Personal Health Record providers who don't have such clout have generally foundered in my opinion.
Posted by: Josh | March 17, 2008 11:22 AMwhen I first saw Dataportability.org come in to existence my first thought was that the Personal Health Record (PHR) has a lot of synergy with Data Portability. Same issue - different data.
I work for one of the members of the BlueCross Blueshield Association, CareFirst, I have been blogging about this for a while now.
http://ekive.blogspot.com/search/label/PHR
The PHR is bigger than anyone company can solve. Even Google! However as we, as individuals, become more active in the management of our own health we will want a bigger say in who owns and can use our medical records. This is why there is an obvious alliance with data portability.
I am not saying this is an easy nut to crack. Far from it! However, it is a very worthy objective.
I am very interested in driving this idea forward and am so pleased to see others thinking along the same lines.
Posted by: Mark Scrimshire | March 17, 2008 2:35 PMIt is of the utmost importance that the average American take this upon themselves and do it quickly. I am the Director of Corporate Sales for a PHR EHR company.
Posted by: Steve Alexander | March 17, 2008 4:14 PMIf we as consumers act quickly and responsibly we will be able to stem the outbound flow of some of our personal rights. If not, then there is little hope of bills and laws being implemented with our best interest in mind. The only solution is for "We the People" to act now and act responsibly.
As a physician, I have blogged about how OpenEMR is Ridiculous.
I'll be glad to debate my position.
Posted by: Davak | March 18, 2008 6:25 PM