personal health records

FierceHealthcare editor Matthew Holt sat in on a conference with tech luminary Esther Dyson at the 2006 Consumer Driven Health Care conference in San Francisco this week. Dyson has been active in healthcare lately, particularly in personal health records. She had some suggestions about the direction that VC money might be flowing in healthcare technology. Potentially hot, according to Dyson, are start-ups that focus on disease management and compliance. She was also interested in …

> Slow stent sales contributed to low first-quarter numbers for Boston Scientific. Article

> FierceHealthcare editor Matthew Holt examines personal health records in Health IT World. Article

> AMA says mergers in the insurance industry are giving consumers fewer choices for …

This week Dell will become the largest U.S. employer to mandate electronic medical records (EMRs) for employees, BusinessWeek reports. CEO Kevin Rollins is expected to announce an initiative at a healthcare forum in Tennessee today that will make 26,000 of the company's employees EMRs. The records will allow employees to track insurance and prescription data as well as medical information. Unlike earlier programs which have relied on employees to enter data, the new system will …

> A  new study finds that many physicians are unhappy about the Bush Administration's pay-for-performance push. Article

> HHS Head Mike Leavitt told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the administration plans changes to Medicare Part D next year. Among them a requirement that insurers answer calls within 30 seconds. …

Subimo is a consumer health information tools company formed by several veterans of Sachs Group in the early days of the dot-com bust. It provides a series of health information modules for consumers. These are now used by many Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, including an expansion announced this week with BCBS of Florida, other insurers and some banks. Their core ability is to take data sources, such as quality metrics and cost information about plans, providers and treatments, and …

Claremont Graduate University, which hosted a conference on personal health records (PHR) this past weekend, announced that it has been awarded a $1 million grant from the Kay Foundation which will go to establish a center for the study of e-health. Dr. Thomas Horan, associate professor of the School of Information Systems and Technology, will head the center. At the conference, several leaders in the eHealth movement discussed the numerous false starts in the PHR movement. One …

> Three hospitals in Los Angeles reluctantly admit that they routinely put homeless patients in taxis with instructions to take them to skid row. Article

> The debate over Medicaid reform has sharply divided Democrats into two groups, as governors say they are in favor of controlling spending. …

The Wired for Health Care Quality Act, passed late last week, grants government support to an interoperable national system of health records and supports funding for electronic medical records projects. Privacy groups are complaining that the legislation contains no provisions to protect the right of patients to determine who has access to their records. The Associated Press reports that 10,000 Americans now have online personal health records--probably a low guess.

- see this article from USA Today

Makers of personal health records (PHRs) are using the chaos and fear created by this year's hurricane season to try to win the public over to their products, a logical strategy which could win over customers if handled properly. Supporters of electronic medical records are pursuing a similar strategy in Washington, arguing that EMR technology could help play a major role in shaping a government response to future disasters or potential national security threats like a biological attack …

Today's Wall Street Journal has an opinion column from IBM's Carol Kovac. She says that we need to "wire our entire healthcare infrastructure into an intelligent national network," but getting there "requires two elusive ingredients: more courageous leadership, and a measure of societal collaboration that transcends politics and preconceptions." IBM announced this week that it would be providing personal health records (PHR) to all its employees, but Kovac realizes that PHRs are …