California's Poizner Touts Personal Health Records

California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, joined by doctors and industry executives from Anthem, UnitedHealth, Health Net, Kaiser and Aetna, announced Tuesday the creation of an industry working group to ensure that patients can transfer their Personal Health Records (PHR) between insurance companies. He also encouraged patients to use PHRs, a tool to manage an individual's medical information.

"The expanded use of personal health records will both improve patient care and potentially reduce health care costs," said Poizner. "To that end, I am working with technology experts to make sure your entire medical history should be available to you, to use as you see fit regardless of who your insurer is at a given time."

A Personal Health Record is a consumer tool to manage an individual's medical information. Nearly all insurers offer PHRs already, but few patients are using them at present. PHRs generally operate like a "calendar of medical events" and medical information like doctor or hospital visits, prescription information, results of cholesterol tests are automatically entered into the PHR.

They can also include information the individual patient wishes to enter, such as childhood vaccinations, living wills or organ donation wishes, family contact information, and much more. Because much of the PHR is filled in automatically by the consumer's insurer, the PHR is likely to be up to-date and accurate.

The working group's members include Kaiser, WellPoint, Blue Shield, Health Net, Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealth. In an effort to ensure privacy is one of the paramount principles of the Personal Health Record effort, the working group has adopted the Fair Information Practices principles, which were created by the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development and have been recommended as basic principles by the World Privacy Forum.

The Insurance Commissioner also released a report on the state of the Personal Health Record in California and how patients can benefit from its use. Among the report's findings are:

Potential Savings to the Patient: Several insurance companies had working examples of cost savings potentials such as cost reductions from eliminating duplicate tests in Emergency Room visits.

Low Utilization Rates: Since PHRs are new services provided by health insurance companies, many patients are either not yet aware of their existence or have not used or registered for use. It appears that generally fewer than 5% of health plan members have made use of a PHR, with the exception of Kaiser. Kaiser, perhaps because of its longer experience with its EMR/PHR system, stated that over 22.1% of its members had activated accounts.

Improving Patient Care: Several insurance companies had working examples of increased clinical effectiveness such as connecting Emergency Room physicians to medical histories in the PHR or by providing complete PHRs to a personal physician.

PHRs Beneficial During Disasters: As one example of PHR usefulness, several newspapers report that PHRs were used in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, when survivors lost or were unable to access physical copies of health records or in California where Kaiser's combined PHR/EMR was available during recent Southern California fires.