Electronic PHR, Google Health Pt. 1

“Overall, participants indicated that they found Google Health more usable because navigation and data entry of health information was easier….” User Centric, Inc.

I’ve been promising for months to walk you through the process of converting your health information 3 ring notebook to an electronic personal health record. Finally, today’s post is the first of many to creating an electronic personal health record (PHR).

In a nutshell, PHR is a consolidated medical record of an individual, stored in electronic format. PHR is owned by the individual. Actually, if you’re paying attention to the healthcare reform debate, you will hear the term EMR, electronic medical records, thrown around. EMR is also a consolidated medical record stored in electronic format but its own by the provider. www.about.com is a good place to start for the non-IT person to gather more info on the in’s and out’s of PHR, EMR, and EHR.

For the most basic of PHR systems, you want a system that gives you the ability to add/delete/share/correct your current and past medical data. There are many PHR choices out there, PC-based, Web-based, partner systems (i.e. Walgreen’s PHR, etc.) free, not-free, and everything in between. There are pros and cons with all of these methods, with web based systems your health data is stored on someone else’s computer, so the question of privacy is of concern; free systems are loaded with advertisements; etc. For my purposes within the blog, I will use Google Health as the illustrative PHR system for converting your healthcare 3 ring notebook to an electronic format.

Google Health is a personal health information centralization service (sometimes known as personal health record services) by Google. The service allows Google users to volunteer their health records – either manually or by logging into their accounts at partnered health services providers – into the Google Health system, thereby merging potentially separate health records into one centralized Google Health profile. -Wikipedia

I will also publish the “Electronic PHR, Google Health” tutorial series in a PDF file. Click here to get the PDF version of what has been published thus far….