Some $19 billion in stimulus bill funding for health information technology has many excited about electronic personal health records becoming a reality sooner rather than later. But a group of researchers has outlined barriers that could muck up the works if not addressed early on.
Among the biggest obstacles are privacy concerns, cost of implementation and sharing of data between organizations, according to the researchers, who will publish their complete findings in the March/April issue of the journal Health Affairs.
“Personal health records controlled by patients that are interoperable with other systems so that they can take their records with them are also essential for empowering patients and ensuring their control over their own health care. Exploring other technologies such as mobile phones as an easier entry point for consumers to access their records could play an important role as well,” said Dr. James Kahn, professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco’s Positive Health Program at San Francisco General Hospital, in a statement.
Integration with social networking sites could even play a role if security issues are addressed properly, the researchers say.
But of course addressing security is the big question. As recent research out of Dartmouth University showed, loads of data is already leaking out of healthcare organizations via P2P networks.
E-health is a hot topic for researchers right now. Worcester Polytechnic Institute is one school where researchers are investigating the benefits of IT health systems and trying to come up with best practices to be shared. They have $750K from the NSF to conduct a three-year study.
