Dave Chase, KevinMD
“More and more providers see the value of providing patient portals. In an attempt to be responsive, EMR vendors are providing patient portals that have some limited capabilities (get lab results, email your doctor and possibly fill out a form requesting an appointment).
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Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, Health Populi
“The market for health and wellness has traditionally included over-the-counter medicines, gym memberships, and vitamins/minerals/supplements. In 2012, the boundaries of health/wellness are blurring beyond these line items toward preventive medical services and consumer electronics.
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Tu HT. HSChange Tracking Report No. 26, 2011
In 2010, 50 percent of American adults sought information about a personal health concern, down from 56 percent in 2007, according to a new national study from the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC). The likelihood of people seeking information from the Internet and from friends and relatives changed little between 2007 and 2010, but their use of hardcopy books, magazines and newspapers dropped by nearly half to 18 percent.
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“Google’s PHR (personal health record) product, Google Health, will cease operations on January 1, 2012. The official Google Blog offers an explanation for the company’s decision to retire their Google Health product: Google’s goal to translate their “successful consumer-centered approach” to the healthcare domain did not have the hoped for impact on a sufficient number of Google users.
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Mary Mosquera, Government Health IT
“The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT will conduct a nationwide campaign to educate the public about the importance of privacy and security in the electronic exchange of their personal health information. ONC said it will include consumer attitudes and preferences when mobile devices are used to communicate health data.
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Marla Durben Hirsch, FierceEMR
“An estimated 56 million people have viewed their medical data on an electronic health record maintained by their doctor, and another 41 million are interested in doing so, according to a new survey released by Manhattan Research.
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MarketWatch
“56 million U.S. consumers have accessed their medical information on an electronic health record (EHR) system maintained by their physician, and an additional 41 million are interested in doing so. These findings come from pharmaceutical and healthcare market research company Manhattan Research’s new Cybercitizen Health(R) U.S. 2011 study of consumer digital health trends, which surveyed 8,745 U.S. adults (age 18 and over) online and on the phone in Q3 2011.
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Patel VN et al, Informatics for Health and Social Care, 2011
We surveyed low-income, ethnically diverse consumers regarding their attitudes towards providers’ use of electronic health information exchange (HIE) and consumer use of HIE through personal health records (PHRs). Amongst respondents (n = 214), 48% had an annual household income below $15,000 and 62% spoke a language other than English at home. A majority indicated that they supported providers’ use of HIE (61%). Support for providers’ use of HIE was independently associated with consumer willingness to permit health care providers other than their primary care doctor to view their electronic medical record information (odds ratio (OR) = 2.92, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.31–6.50) and beliefs that electronic health record use would improve quality of care (OR = 2.70, 95% CI = 1.18–6.18). Seventy-eight percent would potentially use PHRs.
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Mary Mosquera, Government Health IT
“The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT will widen its efforts in mid-September to bring consumers into its orbit of tools and outreach with a campaign to get the public more involved in their health and health care.
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Brian Eastwood, Health IT Pulse
“Although many factors hinder the adoption of consumer health technologies, poor design remains the biggest obstacle. This phenomenon isn’t limited to devices that are difficult to use — patient portals and personal health record services aren’t catching on either.
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Neil Versel, mobihealthnews
“The eighth annual Healthcare Unbound conference revealed a tension in the m-health marketplace between cutting-edge technology and ease of use.
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Kent Bottles, KevinMD
“At one time I thought Google Health would become the Personal Health Record (PHR) that would allow individual patients to keep track of their medical and daily activity data and apply the WHO definition of health to their own life; I blogged about PHRs because I hoped they would solve the enormous problem of hospital based IT systems not communicating with each other.
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Bryce Williams, Fast Company
“There are three reasons. But the underlying cause is that there is no such thing as a consumer in the American health care system today. A consumer is someone who uses personal dollars to buy goods and services for his or her own use. In our health care system, the users of medical services are, of course, individuals.
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Shahid N. Shah, The Healthcare IT Guy
“While PHRs haven’t caught the healthcare world by storm, their “Patient Portal” cousins are doing great. Unlike PHRs, which are usually managed and maintained by patients, “Patient Portals” are managed and maintained by a healthcare professional or provider organization — and usually allows for a major feature: messaging and private emails.
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Doing-Harris KM, Zeng-Treitler Q. J Med Internet Res, 13(2)
BACKGROUND
Consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) have been developed to aid consumer health informatics applications. This purpose is best served if the vocabulary evolves with consumers’ language.
OBJECTIVE
Our objective was to create a computer assisted update (CAU) system that works with live corpora to identify new candidate terms for inclusion in the open access and collaborative (OAC) CHV.
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Gibbons MC et al, Translational Behavioral Medicine, 1(1)
An increasing array of technology based tools are available for patient and consumer utilization which claim to facilitate health improvement. The efficacy of these Consumer Health Informatics tools has not previously been systematically reviewed. As such a systematic evidence review of the efficacy of consumer health informatics tools was conducted. This review also sought evidence of any barriers to future widespread utilization of these tools and evidence of economic impact of these tools on health care costs.
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John Moore, Chilmark Research
“By and large, people do not care about their healthcare until they have to, either for themselves or a loved one. Even then, if they are very sick, it may be far more than they are capable of to set-up and maintain a PHP.
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Molly Merrill, Healthcare IT News
“Consumers are tracking their own health data online, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the California HealthCare Foundation.
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Neil Versel, mobihealthnews
“The National Partnership last week led a coalition of 27 consumer, labor and patient advocacy groups called the Consumer Partnership for eHealth in releasing a potentially groundbreaking document that spells out a vision for a communication-centric healthcare system that makes patients the leaders and partners in their own wellness and care.
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Rich Daly, ModernHealthcare
“Patients need to play a greater role in the development of health IT standards to avoid a lack of public participation that could undermine the federal government’s $19 billion initiative to spur the use of digital records in healthcare, according to an alliance of consumer, labor and patient advocacy organizations.
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