I received this email in my inbox this morning:
Thank you for being a loyal user of the Revolution Health Personal Health Record. Unfortunately we will be discontinuing this service as of the end of February 2010 and removing all records, information, and data from the Revolution Health Web site.
So that you don’t lose the information you’ve entered into the system, we strongly suggest that you download your personal records as a PDF to print and save for future reference. To do this, simply follow these instructions:
- Log in to your Personal Health Record.
- From any page of your record, click on the “printable version” link on the top right corner of any page. When you see a pop-up box asking you to “Select the following sections to include in your print out,” simply make sure that the sections you want to print and save are checked and then click the “Submit” button.
- Once the PDF is created (this only takes a moment), you can print directly from it and/or save it to your computer. To print the PDF, click on the printer icon at the top left of the page. To save it, click on the disk icon to the right of the printer icon.
If you encounter a problem printing or saving your records, please e-mail our customer service department at CustomerCare@revolutionhealth.com for assistance. Even after the Personal Health Record is no longer available, Revolution Health and our partner sites will continue to offer you the same great health information and community pages as always. We hope you continue to visit Revolution Health often to take advantage of our offerings.
Thank you,
The Revolution Health Team
What happened here???? what’s the lesson?
see John Moore’s always astute commentary at:
http://chilmarkresearch.com/2010/01/27/the-phr-risk-revolution-health-axes-phr/
Incredible!
Apart from any business lessons, I’m amazed that they are only offering a PDF version of the record. This means that most people will have to get information re-typed, with all the confidentiality issues and scope for errors that introduces. The least they should do is offer a text-friendly output of the record so that someone, sometime, can attempt to load it into another PHR.
the real question is why are the exiting the business and what does this mean for other standalone PHR vendors? could they not have a business model that works? will others follow this exit?
Anybody know why Revolution Health just now let me sign up for a new account? There is no notice whatsoever on their site of this change, and nothing on my “My Revolution” page that suggests anything but business as usual. I even got a really nice “welcome” email. I can blindly use all the features, enter all my health data… yikes.
One lesson is that national strategies with the right strategy with the right leadership team and strong funding fail consistently. Maybe the lesson here is go local, don’t get VC funding, and don’t hire celebrities. Steve Case as founder seemed pretty exciting at the inception of Revolution Health. Colin Powell’s keynote address at the national credit union conference plugging Revolution Health was pretty exciting, too. He was gunning to intermediate the financial institutions to a custodial role for health data. Arguably a great strategy but what Main Street actor cares? And what do Colin Powell and credit unions have to do with health care? A lot, in theory, but only if they can get local engagement in these very personal issues.
As for a remedy for you, Vince, maybe you can contact some of your law school alums and get involved in a class action. Given that legislatures have deferred to courts rather than addressing these kinds of harms head-on, I would expect to see a new string of class actions developing around breach of duty in failure to maintain an EHR. Each individual’s harm isn’t that great, but the interests of justice do seem to favor some remedy.
Same kind of thing happened with Canopy Financial earlier this year. They had all the tricked out PHR tools, and then blew up and reportedly had their deposits frozen by the FBI. Not fun to have creditors poking around your PHI looking creatively on some way to satisfy a claim. If the VCs can’t do adequate due diligence, how are the Main St. people going to do it?
Certification of some sort would be good. Regulation helps, too, but maybe not much. There could be an FDIC-insured equivalent assurance of proper back-ups in an escrow account accessible by the consumer.