Over and over again I hear the oft-stated claim that there are currently over 200 personal health record solutions available in the market today.

Problem is, I can’t find them.

The bigger problem, however, is that I hear this claim from all corners of the healthcare sector, including most PHR vendors. If anyone should have an accurate read of this market, one would think it would be the PHR vendors, but alas, this is not the case.

So how many PHR vendors are there today?

Glad you asked. According to research to date, I have uncovered the following:

• There are well less than 100 PHR vendors today, which includes both Web-based solutions and USB solutions.  Note: I have not done an exhaustive survey of solutions in other regions of the world and I do not include simple portals.
• Of those, roughly 40% of PHR vendors have offerings that are so poorly designed with limited functionality and/or have non-existent go-to-market strategies as to be completely irrelevant.
• Another 40+% have potential but either their marketing strategy is far ahead of their product or they have yet to create a sales and marketing engine to successfully take their product to market.  These vendors will struggle to become relevant.
• That leaves roughly 20% of all PHR vendors in the market today has having some form of mojo, be it product, marketing or other, that gives them relevance today and may make them successful and relevant 3 years from now.

This is an extremely young and still very immature market. Much will change in the coming three years and it is difficult to predict the eventual outcome.  There is one certainty you can bank on, however, and that is applying the 80-20 rule to this market.  Pay attention to the 20% that matter and ignore the rest.