Microsoft Tries a Round with the Personal Health Record

By John M Grohol PsyD
October 5, 2007

Whether you call it a personal health record (PHR, the current in-vogue term) or an electronic medical record (EMR), it’s an idea that’s been kicking around for over a decade. A dream of health administrators and people who love tidy electronic bytes storing our personal health data, it’s an idea that has come back into vogue with everyone from Steve Case’s Revolution Health (via SimoHealth) to Google, to now Microsoft, with the introduction of its Health Vault service this week.

Time and time again I’ve seen these attempts to entice people to enter their health information into an online database come and go. So maybe the time is right for them to finally catch on.

Maybe. But significant problems remain that few of these services address. For instance, there’s no data exchange among them (although that appears to be slowly changing). There’s no openness or public standards. And most tellingly, there’s no grassroots drive that suggests people are clamoring for access to the “right” personal health record to come along that will suddenly change the enormous data entry requirements to get a good one up and running, and to keep it updated regularly (because the only thing worse than no data on a patient is bad data).

People generally take their health for granted until something goes wrong with it. Even then, most people treat healthcare episodically, not as an integrated, daily or weekly part of their routine (outside of some routine exercise or a general attempt to eat more healthy). Is asking people to enter in and then track and maintain a record online really going to change an entire society’s attitudes toward their own bodies and health? I have my doubts.

So what happens to these kinds of services?

They service people with chronic conditions, generally, people with long-term but terminal conditions where monitoring their health becomes a part of their attempt to extend their life, and people who are very proactive about their health in general.

Another challenge with these services is that most of them don’t survive long. In fact, I can’t think of a company who was trying this back in 1999 that’s even still around offering the same service. Without a clear business model (somebody’s got to be charged for these services eventually, and it won’t be the consumer who ends up paying), there’s little guarantee that all the effort you expend into putting your data into any given personal health record service is going to be available to 10 years from now. Say what you will about the inefficiencies of paper, but at least that record is physically stored somewhere and readily available, and usually for as long as you’re alive and an active patient of your doctor’s.

We wish new personal health record services like Microsoft’s the best of luck. We think the potential for a truly personal and portable health record that requires little to no maintenance on the part of the patient has a lot of potential. But we’re nowhere close to being there yet.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues, and the intersection of technology and psychology since 1992.