Smart PHR offers secure online sharing of records among patients, doctors

BOULDER – Christy Blakely struggled to track her daughter Lauren’s diverse medical records, medication dosages, physical therapy schedules and caregiver instructions.

Lauren, 25, has cerebral palsy.

SPONSORED CONTENT

People Powered: Preparing Longmont Businesses for Economic Success

Longmont Chamber and FNBO present People Powered on April 24, 2024, aiming to inform business owners about workforce development, housing, and transportation issues.

“All her life, I’ve had to keep materials in her bag wherever she went, with her medical history and step-by-step instructions about her needs since she can’t speak,” Christy said. “My hope and dream was to have a technological tool to keep her records in one place – now it’s here.”

As director of Denver’s Family Voices Colorado, Christy is one of several evaluators of Boulder-based Prosocial Application Inc.’s Smart PHR – a consumer-controlled online personal-health records and individual-care plan system. The system allows people, agencies, hospitals, caregivers and physicians to share information through Web-based applications.

Smart PHR has a secure Web site that allows people to upload files, view records and update personal medical information. A personal doctor, caregiver or insurance company can view a person’s records from one location if granted access.

“Smart PHR establishes a new paradigm of health-care automation, with consumers actively engaged in their wellness care,´ said John Donnelly, Prosocial’s vice president of operations and information technology.

With a capital outlay of $2 million from private donations, Prosocial was founded in 2002 by personal-health records advocate Elaine Blechman, psychology professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and her husband, dentist and engineer Joshua Friedman.

Prosocial is meeting with venture capitalists to expand marketing operations and business contracts with state agencies, Motorola, Dell and Wal-Mart’s new primary-care clinics. The company is planning to add to its five-person staff, particularly to address privacy concerns, customer service and system security.

Smart PHR offers clients and care providers licensed accounts from $25 to $100. It offers nine tiers of agency accounts of up to 1,000 licenses from $10,000 to $125,000.

Donnelly said Smart PHR meets the requirements of the Health Care Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, which creates uniform standards for transmitting electronic health-care claims and protects the privacy of individuals’ health-related information. “Washington is pushing the whole concept of PHRs for consumers – it supports the administration’s priority to provide Americans with electronic health records by 2014.”

In March, U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy D-R.I., introduced a revision of bill HR 6289 – the Personalized Health Information Act – promoting the use of personal-health records to consumers and providers. Also introduced in March, Colorado Senate bill 07-211 calls for a committee to review Colorado’s electronic benefits management system by January 2008.

“Fewer than 20 percent of physicians have PHRs, resulting in difficulty in piecing together a complete record of a consumer’s health,” Donnelly said. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported that one in 10 Americans has a chronic illness or impairment, accounting for 70 percent of health-care expenditures.

“Our main customers are state agencies that must deal with case management and care initiatives. Smart PHR will have a long-term impact to reduce the costs in health care overall,” Donnelly said.

Four sites are testing Smart PHR, Denver’s Family Voices Colorado, the Gerontology Center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, Department of Education in Orange County in California and the Institute for Behavior Change and Research in Washington, D.C, run by Cornell University’s Institute for Policy Research.

Dr. David Stapleton, director of Cornell’s site, said they are conducting the tests with Denver Health’s oncology division to provide users help through the care process. Denver Health defined distinct protocols and adherence metrics.

“We collect data in a control group study to compare findings, interview providers (oncologists), patients and navigators,” Stapleton said.

The three-year tests, concluding in June 2010, include enrolling patients and 18 months of data collection.

“The main resistance is that physicians are unwilling to use the tool. Implementing personal-health records represents a major shift from the way physicians do business. Plus, providers don’t want another chore if they’re not paid for it,” Stapelton said.

If passed, Kennedy’s legislation provides physicians with an incentive of $3 per patient each year for every patient enrolled in a personal-health record.

“There’s strong tension between hospitals and insurers about controlling who sees information. Aetna provides a personal-health record to all enrollees, but you lose the information if you change insurance companies. It’s better if patients can own their own records as with Smart PHR so they can take it to any insurer,” Stapleton said.

 “We think about health as reactive, only when there are problems. But we need to be proactive. Do you know where your benefits book is? For a typical child under 10, it would only take two hours every other month to enter information. You can fit it into your daily routine,” Christy said.