HIPAA Blog

[ Wednesday, March 18, 2009 ]

 

PHRs Get Patients Involved in Their Own Care: This makes sense, and is one of the good reasons why increased use and access of personal health records (as opposed to electronic medical records or electronic health records*, which are the records in doctors' offices and hospitals) is a good thing. In addition to personal portability (the Hurricane Katrina experience) and ease of remembering (if you can't remember the names of all the prescription drugs you take), having a personally-available medical file can help you remember appointments, remember to take your meds, know what foods to avoid, know what exercises to do, etc.


*Allow me a rant here: Another screw-up in ARRA (the so-called Stimulus Bill), in addition to Chris Dodd's AIG bonus legalization provision, is the use of EHR as the acronym instead of EMR. Everyone dealing with this stuff knows that an EMR is what physicians' offices and hospitals have, and PHRs are what individuals have. Using those 2 acronyms, there's only 1 common letter. But sometimes people use "electronic health record" to mean either of the two types of electronic records: professional's medical records, or individual's personal medical records. ARRA does call those personal records PHRs, but instead of using the better acronym EMR, they use the confusing acronym EHR to describe the professional records. Bad form.

Jeff [11:23 AM]

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