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Archive for the ‘HIE’ Category

PHR Standards Big Step Forward

• Posted June 26th 2008
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• by Janice

While privacy concerns remain a deterrent to the adoption of personal healthcare records (PHRs), a lack of standards may be an even stronger one. Consumers don’t like to expend time and money on new technology that can’t easily synch up with other devices or content (certainly you remember “Betamax”?).

To help overcome both concerns, the Markle Foundation has just published a set of practices for handling PHR information in Connecting for Health Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information.  The framework was developed with a workgroup that included payers, providers, health IT vendors, healthcare publishers and advocates, physician organizations and policy analysts.  The group includes Google Health, Microsoft, Intuit, WebMD, Revolution Health, Aetna, AARP, Kaiser Permanente, BCBS, Consumers Union, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Dossia, Ingenix, Cisco, and others.  (See the complete list in the press release: www.connectingforhealth.org/news/pressrealease_062508.html.)

The publishing industry has a dismal record of developing standards that facilitate data exchange. That’s why it is important to note that the complete report includes seven sections on technology standards and requirements along with nine sections on policy issues.  In consumer health care publishing, policymakers and technology companies play important roles, so perhaps they will push content providers to create and adopt standards. In the section of the report titled, An Architecture for Consumer Participation, the importance of portability and interoperability of the PHR is emphasized:

For PHRs to become more universally useful to consumers, they must provide a convenient and secure means of connecting to personal data and interactive services from multiple sources, and they must provide a convenient and secure means of moving the data out of the PHR as well, in whole or in part.[1]

At last year’s Health Content07 conference, there was a wide divergence of opinion about how long it will take before PHRs become mainstream. The Technology Overview section of the Markle report depicts how “health care entities and consumer technology innovators operate under different cultures that can clash without basic rules of the road“.  The technology standards and policy principles laid out in the Connecting for Health framework are a first step towards overcoming the hurdles on the road to adoption of PHRs.  However, according to recent research also reported by the Markle Foundation, only about 2.7 percent of the population they surveyed are using PHRs. The question of how quickly consumers will adopt PHRs is clearly still open for debate. 

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[1] Connecting for Health Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information, The Markle Foundation, www.connectingforhealth.org/license.html, section CT7, An Architecture for Consumer Participation, page 4, June 2008. 

 

Availity, Health Market Science Expand Licensing Agreement

• Posted April 22nd 2008
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• by Marji

Availity LLC, a health information exchange, and Health Market Science Inc., a manufacturer of health care provider reference data in the U.S. announced an expansion to their licensing agreement. The previous agreement called for licensed information for select states. This new agreement with provide Availity access to information about more than 4.5 million individual providers and one million provider organizations across the U.S.

Customers of the Availity Health Information Network (a secure web portal) can now easily search provider profiles in the HMS Provider Master File (which contains the listings of the providers and provider organizations). They can also segment the data by contact information, demographics, specialty, education and ethnicity. HMS data can be integrated with customers’ existing provider information.

It just makes sense for these companies to deepen their alliance. Availity will most definitely benefit by being able to provide customers a more robust database in which to find information they need–and find it quickly. Having such data integrated into their workflow will undoubtedly improve the efficiency of Availity customers–and this is functionality that has become a must-have for most information providers today.

This more robust offering may serve to attract more customers to Availity, especially those seeking a seamless solution. HMS may also be able to attract more customers as a result, as it gains more exposure in the marketplace with its position within Availity’s platform.