ike a recurring dream about having to take a test they didn’t study for,
some physicians view the idea of patients with electronic personal health
records as their own personal nightmare.
Visions of patients handing over a computer disk containing years’ worth of
blood-pressure readings taken every four hours along with random recollections
of rashes and muscle strains that physicians are required to somehow make sense
of and memorize are followed by thoughts of being sued because there was a
kernel of important information missed in the deluge.
"That’s why folks like me are terrified of personal health records and what
patients will bring to us," internist Dr. Michael Zaroukian said earlier this
year during a panel discussion at the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise
Connectathon, an event that brought electronic medical record vendors together
to solve interoperability problems. It was sponsored by the Healthcare
Information and Management Systems Society, the Radiological Society of North
America and the American College of Cardiology.
While Zaroukian, who is chief medical information officer at Michigan State
University, is now backing away from the word "terrified," he still maintains
"there are certainly lots of reasons to be concerned."
The reasons for concern that Zaroukian cites include: the accuracy,
completeness, usefulness and volume of the records physicians receive from
patients; the hours of uncompensated work it will take to slog through them; and
the potential for a misdiagnosis if something important was overlooked.
"In some ways, it’s simply an electronic extrapolation of what we’ve seen in the
paper world," Zaroukian says. "The greater the volume, the more likely it is
that relevant data will be lost."
Zaroukian certainly isn’t the only physician who feels this way.
"He has every reason to be frightened by that, and I don’t see what he is
describing as an improvement over someone bringing in an entire paper chart,"
says Joseph Heyman, a gynecologist and American Medical Association trustee. "I
don’t blame a physician for worrying about that. I think the beauty of a
personal health record is, if it’s a snapshot of a patient and their most
important demographics—like their current condition, allergies and
medications—that’s entirely different from their entire medical history for
their entire life."
Dr. Peter Basch, medical director for e-health at MedStar Health in Washington,
says physicians love a hospital discharge summary that gives one to two pages of
key points. What they may get from a personal health record, however, could be
something that has no resemblance to a discharge summary at all.
"Electronic records make it easier to share more information and images, so
often what could be included on one page is now included on 10 and 12 pages,"
says Basch, an internist who serves on the medical informatics subcommittee of
the American College of Physicians.
Though imperfect, he says a quick two- to three-minute oral history taken during
an office visit can be more helpful than an extensive personal health record.
"It’s like saying to a patient, ‘Tell me about the rash,’ " Basch says. "Don’t
give me a seven-hour history of every rash you’ve had in your life."
Zaroukian says that while things like patient-recorded blood pressure readings
can be useful, the value is not in each particular entry, but in the average and
the range of high and low readings.
He says diabetic patients often give him diaries of insulin doses and
pre-breakfast blood-sugar levels recorded in meticulously arranged rows and
columns, but—despite their neat appearance—the numbers are not distilled into a
usable format.
"You have to skip between rows and try to average the numbers somehow, but it’s
impossible," Zaroukian says. "The data is so poorly organized that it not only
does not improve quality, it could contribute to making a bad decision."
Nevertheless, he says that personal health records could be an important tool in
developing a partnership with patients, so he "gently forces" them to use the
spreadsheets—either paper or electronic—that he has developed.
"Over time, patients see how their own self-management can be improved, so over
time they become more interested in doing so," Zaroukian says. He adds that the
key is to make it easy to record the information in a usable format so the
patient-maintained record is not "just a few jewels of data floating in a sea of
debris."
Organization and quality of the data are paramount to making the personal health
records useful, says Heyman, who has a solo practice in Amesbury, Massachusetts.
"I think at the AMA, we believe there can be great value to PHRs and they can
save physicians and patients a great deal of time, while helping to avoid
medication errors and duplicate laboratory tests," he says. "But there is a risk
of ‘garbage in, garbage out,’ and if the record is populated by the patient,
there are errors of understanding that can be inputted by the patient."
Basch says it’s not the personal health record alone that will create savings or
improvements in care or efficiency, but it could be the tool that helps a
motivated patient to achieve those results. In fact, all the information
included in the popular physician-provided personal health record iHealthRecord
from Medem, a San Francisco-based company founded by the AMA and several other
medical societies, is entered by the patient (although if patients choose, they
can have data automatically flow into their personal health record as it is
entered in their physician’s electronic medical records system).
"Some patients will rise to the occasion, and some won’t," he says. "But for
patients with diabetes, hypertension or congestive heart failure, daily or
weekly recordings of blood pressure and weight could result in useful
information that could stem chronic conditions from going bad and save a lot of
ER visits."
For these patients with chronic conditions, Basch cites key barriers to
primary-care physician involvement in helping develop and maintain a patient’s
personal health record: a lack of reimbursement for coordination of care among
specialists; uncertainty regarding the legal responsibilities of helping a
patient maintain a personal health record; and knowing what the record contains.
"With personal health records, one of the issues is the core problem of
financing health care where information management and discussions with patients
are poorly reimbursable in the context of an office visit,’ he says. "Those are
currently seen as an uncompensated burden on physicians."
Making sense of complicated and unorganized records can require four to five
hours of work—whether the records are on paper or in an electronic format—Basch
says, but this is accepted in most sectors because "there’s an unwritten rule
that a primary care physician’s time is not relevant and that information
management isn’t really work."
"There’s no payor who will say, ‘Sure, I’ll pay you for your time.’ They’ll say,
‘Too bad; learn how to do it in 60 seconds,’ " Basch says.
Steven Waldren, director of the American Academy of Family Physicians’ Center
for Health Information Technology, says personal health records haven’t caught
the attention of most doctors yet. But for the relatively small portion of
physicians who have implemented electronic records, personal health records are
known entities and these doctors’ main concern is about workflow.
Establishing personal health record data standards—what information to include
and in what format—will be important to solving workflow and data-management
problems, Waldren says, adding that it’s time for physicians to get familiar
with personal health records.
"PHRs are here and will continue to be," Waldren says. "If the health care
consumer empowerment trend continues to move in the direction it’s moving, we’ll
continue to see growth in the tools available for patients."
Waldren mentions health care decision-support applications as one of the tools
patients will be using soon, yet the prediction is already coming true. Earlier
this month, Verizon Communications
announced it was offering personal health
records to 900,000 of its employees, retirees and family members, and that the
system would include alerts that would inform users when their care "may not be
consistent with evidence-based medicine."
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