The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has a new project to learn how to persuade older Americans to begin using personal health records on the Internet.
Four health plans that already offer PHRs will make them available to their Medicare customers through a CMS portal, mymedicare.gov. In the next 18 months, CMS will study the customers’ response to the PHRs and evaluate the features of each product and ways to promote usage.
The health plans – HIP USA, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – will populate the PHRs with summary information such as medication lists, medical conditions and policy numbers. The beneficiary will control who sees the information, according to a news release from CMS.
Because each plan has a different PHR offering, CMS can compare them and determine which features are most appealing to Medicare beneficiaries, what content and functions should be included in a PHR and which outreach strategies are most effective.
In an e-maile response to questions about the project, Lorraine Doo, senior adviser in CMS’ Office of Electronic Standards and Services, said the agency has no goals or expectations about the number of beneficiaries who will use the PHRs “because uptake across all sectors is very small at present.”
The insurers are not being paid for their participation, she said. An undisclosed amount of money from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality will pay for research in the project.
The current project is part of a larger CMS program to promote use of PHRs. Advocates say that PHRs will enable patients to take a more active role in their own health care and communicate better with care providers.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
