IBM has recently announced two groundbreaking initiatives to improve the capabilities and value of personal health records (PHR) and is tied to the Obama administrations' investment in health care IT to help improve patient care.
IBM and Google are improving the capabilities and value of personal health records - the core element of smarter health care delivery - starting with Google Health. The new advances - powered by IBM software - allow all kinds of personal medical devices used for patient monitoring, screening and routine evaluation to automatically stream their results into an individual's Google Health Account or other personal health record. From there, patients can direct how their "health diaries" will be shared with physicians, family and other members of the extended care network. It will mean that with the new technology, a busy mom can receive daily electronic updates on the health status of an aging parent who lives alone, is suffering from high blood pressure and is on multiple medications. Or, a traveling businesswoman who is diabetic and training for a marathon can have a real-time discussion about her blood sugar levels and heart rate with her coach hundreds of miles away.
Privacy concerns
Along with the potential benefits, there are privacy concerns associated with making patient records and device data more portable, experts warn. These concerns have come to be a major issue in lawmaker's debate over funds given to health IT in the economic stimulus package.
"People are worried about privacy, and rightfully so," says Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM's global healthcare and life sciences industry group. He believes that the best solution is the standard-based approach Google and IBM are taking which allows for more widely applicable security and frees technology vendors to focus on improving other features. Pelino noted that IBM has been inundated with phone calls from companies who are excited and ready to work with the new system.
No matter how many issues EMRs and EHRs face - no matter how much confusion or legal justifications - it is probably safe to say that EMRs and EHRs will soon affect our lives and the health care industry as a whole in a much larger sense than ever before - because they offer a vast improvement in our health care system over the old file cabinets and patient folder systems and because the government is pushing to make it happen.
There are a number of acronyms concerning the health care
