This week has been personal health record survey week. Both the Markle Foundation and Manhattan Research came out with survey results showing that there is widespread approval of the concept of personal health records among the public, and a minority are even likely to use one. This, of course, is news in the wake of the Gulf Coast hurricanes, which showed the need for better medical record availability of all kinds. But the key need for personal health records is to connect them with the information which insurers and providers already have about patients. So far that connection has been limited, and it's in part been slow because of the slow rate of EMR adoption in physicians' offices. While HHS has now decided to count that rate of progress, there are still many good ideas to come--or Federal funding to increase it--and the adoption of personal health records will be limited by that problem. For much more on this issue, see the discussion in The Health Care Blog [1]. - Matthew [2]

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