How Safe is Your PHR?

by Carol Selvey

It’s bad enough that we have to worry about snooping in hospitals and physicians’ offices, but it seems inevitable that we will have concerns about the vulnerability of personally identifiable healthcare information stored in our personal health records (PHRs).  Have you started populating a PHR provided by your healthcare provider or recommended by your commercial laboratory? My husband recently loaded his lab test results into Google Health. So far, so good, no apparent breaches!) Have you wondered if your information is secure or whether your data may be accessible to others without your consent?

Patient Privacy Rights (PPR) is a not-for-profit organization based in Texas led by Dr. Deborah Peel, “dedicated to ensuring Americans control all access to their health records.” PPR coordinates the Coalition for Patient Privacy, a bipartisan network of state and national organizations and health IT corporations working to restore our right to control access to our sensitive health records.  This group provides direct input to policymakers about the need for health privacy for all Americans and works together to build an electronic healthcare system where patients can keep their health records private.

It recently released its Personal Health Record Report Cards for several leading Personal Health Record products:  Cap Med – icePHR, Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, No More Clipboard and WebMD.

The criteria used to rate the platforms and products is consistent with the organization’s key principles:

• ACCOUNTABILITY – Hold every entity with access to health information accountable.
• CONTROL – Ensure individuals control the use of their personal health information.
• TRANSPARENCY – Protect consumers from abusive practices.

Even though Microsoft participates in PPR’s Coalition for Patient Privacy, it rated a grade of ‘B’ while No More Clipboard rated an ‘A.’ I was interested to see that the report card exercise made no mention of Tolven’s ePHR, even though Tolven is a participant in PPR’s Coalition. Since Tolven provides open-source healthcare solutions, perhaps it defies categorization and analysis in the current field of PHRs. If you are thinking about populating a PHR with your data any time soon, you may want to check out PPR’s assessments at http://www.patientprivacyrights.org/site/PageServer?pagename=PHR_Report_Card.

Do you have a PHR? How do you think yours rates on privacy?