One of the better IT publications is Baseline.  Their reporters typically do in-depth stories on various IT subjects and their case studies of large IT implementations are some of the best I have seen (and in my decade plus as an analyst, I’ve seen a lot).

This week, Baseline published an article on privacy and PHRs.  Article was prompted by the Markle Foundation’s announcement last week of the Privacy Framework.  The article does a good job of laying out the privacy issue for the reader, but like all too many articles on the subject of PHRs, it sits on the privacy issue as being the key deterrent to PHR adoption among consumers.

Are reporters just being lazy?

Really getting quite tired of this argument.  When will reporters start focusing on what are some of the real barriers to PHR adoption?  We can start with the lack of data liquidity and the paltry investment of the healthcare sector in IT. Do you really think most consumers are going to enter all that data by hand? We can then move to the immaturity of standards and their adoption that hinder data exchange. Ditto! And let us not forget vested interests that would rather not let you have control of your personal health information. Give me my data and let me take it wherever I choose to go.

From there, we can then focus on what benefits might the consumer accure from using a PHR that is automatically populated with their data, allows them to share that data at a granularity desired with whom they choose, possibly monitor the health of loved ones, subscribe to highly personalized services, be made aware of pertinent clinical trials that they may wish to participate in and the list goes on.

Will these benefits be enough to overcome the risks? For the majority of Americans, I would argue yes.

Now, if I could only get a few reporters to sign-on to such in-depth reporting, we might actually get somewhere.