David Harlow has an excellent post over at HealthBlawg, which summarizes recent discussions regarding patient control over health data over at his blog: 

He also does an excellent job at posing two questions which require further consideration.

Below are some of my initial thoughts to his queries.  I would encourage my readers to take a look at HealthBlawg and join the conversation at David’s Blog, er Blawg. 

The two questions are: 

#1:  Are patients now ready to insist on having their health care providers upload their health information to PHR systems such as Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault?  Answer:  Yes.  Absolutely, and the person who finds the most seamless way to do this will reap immeasurable financial and reputational rewards.  See details below…

#2:   Are PHR platforms and health care providers prepared (and equipped) to act on these requests?  Answer:  No.  And that’s too bad.  (See my answer to #1).

A quick reference point.  In my practice as a high risk pregnancy specialist, I am often asked to evaluate patients who have had a previous stillbirth.  This is a difficult situation and (of course) the first question that a patient has for the next pregnancy is; “Will I have another stillbirth?”  In many cases, the answer lies in the cause of the initial stillbirth.  Invariably, at the time of the initial adverse outcome, there are a large battery of tests done to determine the cause of death for the first child.  Unfortunately, many patient’s do not have or know the results of these tests when they come to see a specialist like myself with their next pregnancy.  A large part of my job is putting on my Sherlock Holmes cap to search through records from other hospitals.  In some cases, I can call and have records in (literally) 5 minutes.  In other cases, I have to fax multiple signed requisitions and then wait days or even months to get the information I have requested.  In one case, I received records from a hospital in Brazil faster than I received records from across town.

This would not be the case if patient’s had access and control to their own health data. 

My hope is that this bottleneck will one day become archaic.  I’m hopeful that this will happen quickly due to the nature of disruption and progress in a digital age. 

Consider this.  There was once a time when to make a withdrawal from a bank you had to physically present yourself to *your* bank to do so.  We now take for granted the ability to have immediate access to our funds from any ATM or grocery store.  Any bank that did not give it’s customers access to funds immediately would (in the current setting) rapidly become obsolete.

Dave DeBonkart (@ePatientDave) has popularized the phrase “Give me my damn data,” and I clearly think he is on to something.  In this day and age, no one would tolerate non-realtime, non-interactive silos for their financial resources.  When banks realized this, they bent over backwards to make sure that consumers had constant access to their funds.

Eventually, health care systems will realize that patients will not tolerate silos for their health information.  When that happens, (soon) I see rapid development of the type of real-time access to transportable health data.  The current barriers will fall only when someone realizes that the old system is inefficient and ultimately less profitable. 

Posted via web from onyeije’s posterous