Hotel chain, Marriott, announced that they are now offering a PHR for their 50,000 employees.  IT publication InformationWeek  wrote a pretty good article covering Marriott’s plans and the Aetna owned ActiveHealth PHR that is being used.  Article also provides a couple of interesting quotes from a physician.

ActiveHealth CEO, Lonny Reisman is quoted claiming that they have some 18 million plus users of ActiveHealth.  Unfortunately, the reporter failed to ask Reisman if these users were using the ActiveHealth PHR, or one of the many other ActiveHealth offerings.

To set the record straight, my estimate is that ActiveHealth has less than 10,000 active PHR users outside of parent Aetna.  Even among the multitudes of consumers that have healthcare coverage through Aetna, the number is far south of 300,000 for active users of ActiveHealth’s PHR.

ActiveHealth is not alone.

Among the many PHR vendors I have interviewed, a universal challenge is the missionary work required to educate the market.  This is still a very new technology, a very new approach to healthcare for consumers, physicians and even employers.   We have a ways to go to get to 18 million as an industry, let alone one single PHR vendor.