Picture of Health: My Mother Always Wanted Me to be a Doctor

Kelly M. Teal
09/19/2008

You’ve probably done it yourself: Suffering from some malady, you go online to a site like WebMD to try to identify and troubleshoot your problem.

Rest assured, you are not alone.

The move to electronic records keeping, and the Internet and broadband in general, are enabling more Americans to play a greater role in their own medical care.

High-tech companies as well as insurance firms and medical organizations are working to promote better member health by getting patients more involved through online access to their information (known in the industry as personal health records, or PHRs) and other resources. Among the online tools that enable individuals to store and manage all their health information in one place, for no fee, are Google’s (GOOG) Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault and WebMD’s Health Manager.

Kaiser Permanente this year chose Microsoft to help it pilot the exchange of its employees’ health care records. Participants in the voluntary trial, expected to launch this fall, will set access permissions, and then they and their physicians will see the same information, such as immunizations, lab results, allergies and prescriptions. Volunteers also can communicate with their doctors via e-mail and grant access to their records to family members. About 600 of the company’s 159,000 staff had signed up by xchange’s press time in August.

“We’re not thinking about this as a cost-savings measure, but as something that really is a service to the members and their desire for flexibility,” said Jan Oldenburg, practice leader in Kaiser Permanente’s health portfolio Internet services group.

“This is a venture into portability,” she added, explaining that means if a member loses or switches from Kaiser Permanente coverage, he or she easily can retain the records.

Kaiser Permanente’s eHealth Vital Stats

2.25 million members maintain active accounts with the HMO’s online application, My Health Manager
10.2 million lab results were viewed in My Health Manager in 2007
1.2 million lab results views were counted by July 2008, with 1.3 million more added every month
3.6 million patient e-mails were exchanged with doctors via My Health Manager in 2007
340 e-mails are sent each month so far this year between patients and doctors, using My Health Manager

Source: Kaiser Permanente

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