Patient Involvement Helps with Reminders and PHRS

Not too long ago I wrote about patient involvement too with Clinical Trials and using personal health records. This article here basically is stating the same thing, patient involvement and using PHRs is a big help, and then of course there’s the consumer education process that is still needed too.

Keep clinical trial patients ‘in the loop’, say the researchers – Use a PHR to get the job done with some Algorithms

Personal Health Records

The study was conducted at Harvard and also suggests involving the hospitals and doctors and the importance of reminders for screenings. The study states that reminding the patients is appearing to have a bit more success rather than just notifying the doctors only. BD

As President Barack Obama pushes for the use of more information technology in the health-care sector, a new study suggests that getting patients involved in the effort, along with hospitals and doctors' offices, can lead to substantial benefits. The research, conducted by Harvard Medical School and two other institutions, shows that reminding patients to take a critical cancer test is actually more effective than reminding their doctors about the same test. "When we talk about improving the health-care system, what we should do is also talk about how we can take advantage of our patients as a resource," says Thomas Sequist, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor of medicine and health-care policy at the Harvard Medical School, and Brigham & Women's Hospital.

Employers are showing an increasing interest in electronic records, too. Last year a coalition of several large companies, including Intel (INTC), BP (BP), Pitney Bowes (PBI), and Wal-Mart (WMT), began trials involving electronic records for their employees. In November, Wal-Mart conducted a major rollout, offering electronic records to 1.4 million of its employees. Participants can get access to their electronic records, which include blood tests, prescriptions, and medical visit history, by logging on to the company's Web site. Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), meantime, are trying a different approach by providing online health records aimed directly at consumers, rather than employers.