A better term than PHR?
I’ve occasionally explored some of the nomenclature in health IT, particularly how the term “personal health record” is something distinct from “electronic health record” and how some news reports confuse the two. I’ve been known to laugh at the use of “personal electronic health record,” which I think was an uninformed reporter’s way of saying that each person should have an EHR.
Over the weekend, I saw a distinct term from, I believe, Australia: “patient-controlled health record.” That makes a lot more sense to me and tells me the purpose of the record. A Google search on that term actually turned up a Harvard Medical School meeting on “personally controlled health record infrastructure” target”= new” that took place in 2006 and 2007. But the term seems to have disappeared from the U.S. radar.
While the term is more descriptive, it's also a mouthful to try to say. And can you imagine the acronym that will develop?
PCHR. It's not bad.I was the co-chair of those conferences, and we decided to promote that term for exactly the reasons Neil outlines – "Personal Health Record" was so overloaded that we wanted a better way to define what we were talking about, which was a patient controlled "health record" – the data – rather than a poorly defined suite of miscellaneous tools including everything from BMI calculators to prescription refill request web sites.We did get some traction on the term – Dossia, in particular – but it wasn't quite as successful a coinage as we'd have liked.