Question

Personal health records are technological tools that are being implemented within the acute care setting to enable data exchange with EHRs and to encourage patient activation in healthcare. How might you foresee the use of patient-entered data from a PHR or patient portal as a public health surveillance tool?

Answer 1

A personal health record (PHR) is a health record where health data and other information related to the care of a patient is maintained by the patient. This stands in contrast to the more widely used electronic medical record, which is operated by institutions (such as hospitals) and contains data entered by clinicians (such as billing data) to support insurance claims. The intention of a PHR is to provide a complete and accurate summary of an individual's medical history which is accessible online. The health data on a PHR might include patient-reported outcome data, lab results, and data from devices such as wireless electronic weighing scales or (collected passively) from a smartphone.

Electronic health records (EHRs) show great potential for use in observational studies to examine drug safety via pharmacovigiliance methods that can find adverse drug events as well as expand drug safety profiles. EHRs also show promise for head-to-head comparative effectiveness trials and could play a critical role in secondary and tertiary diabetes prevention efforts. A growing subset of EHRs, personal health records (PHRs), opens up the possibility of engaging patients in their care, as well as new opportunities for participatory research and personalized medicine. Organizations nationwide, from providers to employers, are already investing heavily in PHR systems. Additionally, the explosive use of online social networking sites and mobile technologies will undoubtedly play a role in future research efforts by making available a veritable flood of information, such as real-time exercise monitoring, to health researchers.

The future confluence of health information technologies will enable researchers and clinicians to reveal novel therapies and insights into treatments and disease management, as well as environmental and genomic interactions, at an unprecedented population scale.