EMR Adoption and PHRs

Chilmark Research published a "PHR Market Report, Analysis and Trends" - the Executive Summary is available for free (with sharing of your details). In their blog commentary they make an relevant point

PHRs simply won’t go anywhere without data and arguably the best source of data is a physician EMR system. Unfortunately, the adoption of EMR is abysmal across the care continuum of providers sitting at somewhere around 15-20% depending on how you count it/who you believe.

And even if you believe the 15-20% penetration of this, the vast majority of the information in these systems comes from dictation and transcription and is stored as blobs of text. There is certainly some potential for the personal health records/systems to help drive the capture of more shareable data. There are problems of security and confidentiality but as they suggest I think the benefits will outweigh the risks in the near future, especially given the entry of Microsoft, Google, Intuit and Dossia (there is a piece of my British Heritage that feels this is not the best name choice - see here).

For both PHR's and EHR's to succeed the data has to be shareable.....easily. It has to be as easy as clicking on a link or plugging in a USB stick and selecting import. To see what this needs to look like you need look no further than Facebook which has rapid user adoption. Facebook has exploded onto the social networking scene by offering simple ways for sharing applications, data and tools between all the users.

The HL7 approved CDA format represents the way forward and the potential to bridge the divide between structured and unstructured content. CDA4CDT commenced the process in 2007 and has defined the formats for 4 document types so far and there are more to come. There are several presentations available here. With shareable formats data can be made available from PHRs to EHRs and vice versa. This will drive adoption in both systems.