Matt Holt, owner and master of The Health Care Blog, has an excellent post today on PHRs and privacy.  It is a long post, at times more of a rambling rant, but in the end it does a great job of thoroughly reviewing a lot of the brouhaha surrounding this topic and discrediting many of the privacy advocate statements that have been made recently.

I’ve written on this topic numerous times, (just click on the “Privacy” in the tag cloud on your right) most recently calling all of this a red herring with the press being extremely lazy and not willing to look beyond the “privacy issue” to what benefits might accrue to the healthcare system via PHRs.

And it is not like the PHR vendors have done all that great  job on the issue either, though I do see that changing with Microsoft now in the market.  Google, in time, can be expected as well to have some good policies in place but to date they have not shared them.  Google missed the boat on that one and I hope they will follow Microsoft’s lead.