Patient Contributions To Personal Health Records ‘Significant'

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Allowing patients to make entries into their personal health records not only empowers patients, it helps providers better manage their care according to a recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study.

The practice of using patients’ own information to create a detailed health record, personalized health IT, or PHIT, has been shown to empower patients to create unique personalized records of their health. “Every patient is unique, from both a personal risk perspective – whether that is a preventable disease progression or a critical care event. In addition, patients come from different socioeconomic behavioral standpoints,” explained Christine Kern in an article for Health IT Outcomes.

Health Data Management reports a program from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation uncovered that patients participating in PHIT programs were more likely to note daily occurrences than anything else – such as sleep patterns, diet, exercise, mood, energy, even their responses to medications and other thoughts.

“People use very personally defined and idiosyncratic cues that give them the impetus to act on their health,” program director Patricia Brennan said in the report. “These may range from how tightly their clothes fit to whether or not they have enough energy to run around after their grandchild. While these may not be indicators of any specific health problem, they are what the person attends to, and if you’re going to have person-centered health, you have to know what the people are paying attention to first. The concept of observations of daily living is an important and missing link in the health data panorama.”

iHealth Beat notes, however, the study also found barriers to the use of patient generated data in clinical practice. These included:

• difficulty keeping up with technological innovations such as smartphone apps and various commercial personal health programs that included PHRs
• skepticism from doctors that having access to patient observations would lead to changes in patient behavior
• providers being unwilling to allocate resources to adapt their health IT systems to accept patients' observations of daily living, in part because of their focus on the meaningful use program

“By putting consumers at the center of the design process, we have demonstrated a powerful vision of how personal health records and new technologies can empower people to better manage their health and work together with their providers to get the care they need,” said RWJF President and CEO Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA.