A Major Step Forward for PHRs
On November 12, acting CMS administrator Kerry Weems and HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt announced a pilot program which will enable Medicare members in Arizona and Utah to use their choice of four commercial personal health record (PHR) providers to access their own data from CMS databases. Beginning in early 2009, beneficiaries with Original Medicare will be able to use Google Health, HealthTrio, NoMoreClipboard.com, or PassportMD to maintain a PHR which will include Medicare information from CMS.
Said HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, "This pilot is a major step forward for Medicare. It will provide information and tools that will empower consumers to manage their health better. Importantly, the pilot provides beneficiaries with a choice of products to meet their individual needs."
What I find remarkable about this new endeavor is that CMS, by all accounts a fairly conservative entity when it comes to sharing its data and embracing new technologies, is actually going to allow both consumers and third-party service providers to access personal health information (PHI) of Medicare beneficiaries. It's hard to see this move as anything less than an explicit endorsement of a "Health 2.0" infrastructure in general and of the concept of PHRs in particular. It would also, evidently, signify that CMS has accepted the HTTPS Internet transmission protocol as secure enough for PHI. From what I hear, in the past CMS has been loathe to allow the transmission of PHI data to or from its databases via the Internet.
CMS funds more than half of the healthcare in the U.S., and isn't shy about attempting to drive adoption and change through its reimbursement policy. I will be very curious to see whether or not, by offering patients access to their own claims data, CMS will create patient expectation that will motivate the private payer community to do the same. It will also be interesting to see what effect this move will have on adoption of PHRs by consumers. Again, it's hard not to see this as a golden opportunity for MTs and others in the health care documentation arena to jump on this bandwagon by providing value-added services to help consumers establish and maintain their own PHRs. CMS and major online players such as Google Health have already done a lot of the marketing work for us with this new initiative.