The site is a nice effort to give consumers a place to list their family health history, but gee, in looking at it, I just see if as another 
duplication of better efforts already in place. There are no 3rd party vendors who will add information for you, so what’s the deal? Sure you can share it and again, it’s nice that the site is there, but I’ll take HealthVault or Google Health any day over using this page, as in my opinion, it’s just another duplication of efforts without any of the added features of those created with full software utilization. 
Data input is a pain in the neck, no matter how you look at it, so to me this appears to be one more duplication in our fragmented healthcare system. The folks who devote their time to working on integrated software and web based products have once more “out coded” what is provided by the government. Will this system require PHR certification too as the review process 
has begun for personal health records? Again, in my small opinion, there are other choices out there that will provide much better options and make the entire process much easier for me. BD
Thanksgiving is an excellent time to start work on creating a family health history, says Alan Guttmacher, M.D., acting director of the National Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
And that resource is becoming increasingly important as genomic and pharmaceutical researchers learn how to develop medications personalized to a patient’s individual genetic make-up. That means particular medications will work best for a patient’s specific genetic blueprint, while similar medications may not provide real benefit, he explained.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s Web site offers a free, secure family health history template.
Family Histories Aid Genomics Effort
With all due respect, Mr. Quack, the Surgeon General's family history tool has been freely available to the public since 2004, predating some of these other tools. It is not government duplication -- your friends in the Public Health Service led the way, continue to innovate and will soon release a revised system for organizing family history informaiton that can then be imported to an electronic health record.
ReplyDeleteNot meaning to discount by any means, but perhaps when the new release comes out there will be some improvements to expedite and make the input process a little less time consuming as that is the key to getting a PHR online, reduce the amount of input for the consumer and make it very simple.
ReplyDeleteThe other PHR systems make it simple to import your labs from Quest as an example as well as prescriptions from the drug stores, in other words 3rd party automation is making quick work for the consumer, which increases the chances that one would entertain putting their records into a PHR, versus manually entering all of this on their own. I know myself speaking just for me, I would consider it too time consuming myself to set down and enter all manually.
What would be ideal is if, as tools like this do continue to evolve, they begin give users the option of using data in the personal health platforms to "prepopulate" forms and reduce the burden of data entry. This is after all what they're for --- to take care of all the yuck of integrating with source systems so that users have a data asset they can use in lots of different ways.
ReplyDelete---S
I can kind of see the point of "anonymous" above--the Surgeon General has been trying to systematically collect family histories for genomics research, replicating on a small scale what DeCode have done on a broad scale (all of Iceland). I think it's good that the government sponsors this kind of research, and makes a data collection tool available on the internet.
ReplyDeleteThe SG office should reach out to Google and try to integrate their tool into Google's health vault. The Surgeon General's tool has probably collected some data to this point, and it would be good to be able to integrate future data collection into what they must already have.
Regards,
http://www.InteractMD.com
I think a duplication of efforts is a waste for everyone involved and that is the problem today with so many areas of healthcare.
ReplyDeleteIf their new system imports information from hospitals, etc. that can be imported in to a PHR, then that could be an asset, but the issues with consumer acceptance is to automate the process and do it for them as myself included, I will not sit down and manually enter the information when a data transfer can take care of it.
Right now the FDA is getting prepared to do the exact same thing for research purposes, mining data from insurance carriers such as Blue Cross and other entities who have expressed an interest in doing the same to create a data base that can be mined to further promote research in genomics too. Clinical trials are using genomics data during the process as well to be able to assess side effects, value, etc. while in process.
If a consumer has a PHR and chooses to share information let's say with a hospital, then that information can be included as well.
Beth Israel Hospital in Boston has a pilot program going on right now with exchanging medical records with Social Security for disability records. The same hospital is also working on a pilot program with the DEA for e-prescribing, so the paper will no longer be necessary on 4 part scripts.
So again, if the PHR is only for consumers to enter information manually and is not a collection of clinical data from other locations, then I agree that PHRs like Google and the HealthVault can be a truly valued asset as if physicians and hospitals are able to share clinical established data, and that is shared with another clinical organization, then we are on our way to less fragmentation.
Again, I think the Sentinel system from the FDA once it is up and going is going to offer a ton of information for all and they will also have information from the grand daddy data base of all, Medicare.
The whole key here is to have a system that works with others and is easy enough for the consumer to work with and get the data input down to a minimum.