Assisted PHRs--A New Opportunity for MTs?
A company called
UNIVAL has recently begun offering a service they call
yourRecords, which helps individuals set up a personal health record (PHR) using Microsoft's
HealthVault application. UNIVAL offers three levels of service. The first, which is free, allows users to add limited information to a HealthVault account via an online portal, including personal and occupational information, as well as emergency contact, insurance and physician information. This free service from
yourRecords doesn't appear to allow users to add actual medical record information through the UNIVAL portal. I doubt most folks would want to use
yourRecords in this limited role when they could enter the same information directly into a HealthVault account on the HealthVault website. Clearly the purpose of the free
yourRecords option is to get potential customers "in the door" with the hopes of up-selling to one of their paid services. The least expensive of these costs $14.95 per year, and for that price you can send your medical records to UNIVAL, where your documents will be scanned and imported into HealthVault as scanned images. For a one-time fee of $44.95, UNIVAL's nursing personnel will abstract data from your medical records into the corresponding sections of your HealthVault account, including medications for the previous two years, allergies, conditions/symptoms, procedures/surgeries, immunizations, lab tests for the previous two years, vital signs, advanced directives, and medical equipment. For an additional $39.95, UNIVAL will update your records for a year via nurse-performed abstraction.
The concept of an assisted PHR service is one I've been touting for some time as a new opportunity for medical transcriptionists. The fact that a company such as UNIVAL is using nurses to perform the abstraction doesn't change my opinion that MTs would be a good fit for this type of work. For MTs looking for more personal contact, an on-site service would be an option to consider. Some potential customers would no doubt prefer to deal with someone in person rather than sending their sensitive medical records off to people they don't know.
In any case, it seems to me that this is a ripe opportunity for entrepreneurial-minded MTs who for whatever reason want to branch out beyond the usual transcribing or editing. PHR applications such as HealthVault, Google Health, and many others have already done most of the technological heavy lifting in terms of organization, storage, and data exchange--the "back end" of the process, as it were. What's needed are skilled individuals to provide "front end" services, interacting with clients to set up a PHR and help input the initial data. No doubt there will be some customers who only need a nudge in the right direction and afterwards will take over the responsibility for keeping their own records updated. But I suspect there's an even larger pool of potential clients who would be willing to pay a service provider a reasonable fee to handle the ongoing task of keeping their PHRs up to date.
I'd love to exchange ideas for this kind of service with anyone who sees potential in the concept. Please feel free to drop me an email or leave a comment.