Over on HIStalk, there was a quick blurb referencing a post over on the WSJ Business Blog. Now I do have an RSS feed coming into my iGoogle tracking the WSJ Health Blog, but not this one, so thanks HIStalk.
Briefly, post is about Larry Stofko, CIO at St. Joseph’s Health System in California who has personally experienced the convoluted and appalling lack of access to records by a patient (in this case it is his wife) who must confer with multiple physicians. One of the more intriguing comments was his openness to receiving targeted ads within a web-hosted PHR.
Sorry that I’m just seeing and replying to this, but I wanted to add a little more to the comment on receiving targeted ads…
My thought was that patients could opt-in to having “targeted alerts” to the PHR that would be based on their relevance to information stored in their record. This would be more meaningful than an ad, but could be related to a treatment break through, a new drug development, or an approval that changed reimbursement.