Presentation: PHRs, What Are They Good For?

Chilmark Research had the privilege and honor to present and moderate a session at the AHRQ’09 event here in Washington DC yesterday.  Title of the session was PHRs: What Are They Good For?  Along with Chilmark Research, we had Kim Slocum of KDS, James Hereford of Group Health and Ted Eytan of Kaiser-Permanente, each giving their own perspectives on the topic.

Kim gave a rather dour presentation on the subject putting forth the argument that we are putting the cart before the horse in that PHRs really go nowhere until EMRs are adopted and HIEs are in place to distribute the data.  Chilmark’s presentation focused on how the PHR market has developed over the years, why PHRs have struggled to see main stream adoption and where we see this market going in the future (we made a push to dump PHR term and start talking about PHPs – Personal Health Platforms).  We also gave some examples of the value that some are seeing from PHR deployments.  Yes SuzieQ, they are good for something but that value depends on how it is deployed, what are the objectives and a significant amount of consumer education.  And no SuzieQ, we believe it would be an absolute disaster to wait for physicians to get on-board with EMR adoption – we consumers cannot wait for them to get their act together as we consumers have seen roughly a 50% increase ($200B in ’00 and our prediction is $300B by end of ’10) in out-of-pocket healthcare expenditures in the last decade! Both James and Ted talked about what their respective organizations are doing today in providing measurable value to their constituents via their sponsored PHRs.  Below is a slide from James’s presentation which gives some pretty interesting statistics for just one week in August.

FYI, AVSs stands for After Visit Summary, which James stated as become the most popular feature – their constiuents just love to see this after an appointment. Another interesting outcome of the AVS is that they have found physicians to be more cognizant, thorough and accurate in putting the AVS together as they know their patients will review it and call them out if something is wrong.  Now that is pretty cool!

Following is the presentation Chilmark Research gave during this session.

[slideshare id=2000845&doc=mooreahrq09-090915105907-phpapp01]

In closing, just wish to give a big thanks to AHRQ and Matt Quinn of AHRQ for taking the risk and allowing someone from outside the somewhat incestuous world of AHRQ grant recipients to not only present, but actually moderate a session.  Hopefully, those in attendance benefited, stated so in their post session evaluation forms and AHRQ will continue to “open-up” in the future.