From January 2004 through June 2004, within the framework of Phase II of Connecting for Health, the Working Group on Policies for Electronic Information Sharing Between Doctors and Patients examined the barriers to adoption of interoperable health information systems that provide for significant patient access and control.
The Working Group encountered enthusiastic patients, clinicians and technologists, united in their passion to permit individuals to be more engaged and successful managers of their own health all of whom recognized that the long-term goals of safe, affordable and high-quality healthcare are unlikely to be achieved without tools that permit patients and families to be more active and successful. The review of these early PHR projects and the emerging challenges lead to three principal recommendations.
Recommendations:
- Increase public understanding of the value of connectivity in health care through a public-private communications campaign
- Seek vendor and provider agreement to specific and comprehensive design principles and policies; and,
- Conduct a small number of PHR demonstration projects incorporating the CFH Common Framework and this report’s recommended PHR design principles and policies.
This report also summarizes the findings of Markle’s extensive public opinion survey conducted in 2004.
