NEJM and NYT Discuss “Tectonic Shifts” of a Personal Health Information Economy

Vince Kuraitis and David C. Kibbe, MD MBA

Tomorrow’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine contains an article entitled “Tectonic Shifts in the Health Information Economy”.  While we have not yet fully digested this article, it’s clear that the authors’ description of the “Health Information Economy” closely parallels our initial description of the Personal Health Information Network (PHIN).

The main thrust of the NEJM article is to discuss implications (good and bad) relating to clinical research. The NEJM article is also highlighted in a New York Times piece entitled “Warning on Storage of Health Records.”

In anticipation of our webinar tomorrow sponsored by Healthcare Informatics, we wanted to bring these articles to your attention ASAP.

As a first pass at discussing these important articles, here are a few highlights from the NEJM article.  Whether you prefer the label the “Health Information Economy” or “Personal Health Information Network (PHIN)”, these excerpts describe the potential magnitude of the tectonic shifts:

…large corporations [e.g., Google, Microsoft, others] are seeking an integral and transformative role in the management of health care information. The mechanism by which this transformation is likely to take place is through the creation of computer platforms that will enable patients to manage health data in personally controlled health records (PCHRs).

If others follow the lead of major health care institutions such as New York– Presbyterian Hospital, which has committed to allow patients to transfer electronic health information into the Microsoft HealthVault personal health record, companies that are new to health care may ultimately house and manage an information repository far larger than any in the academic sector.

Such qualitative and quantitative changes in the health information economy will certainly affect our biomedical research system in ways that cannot be fully predicted. This consumer-driven model of data aggregation may promote data liquidity far more than competing approaches, such as health information exchanges….

…many consumers with PCHRs will soon control a valuable resource — an integrated copy (possibly the only such copy) of their health care information across sites of care and over time as well as the annotations and supplementary information they provide.

More later….