Baby Boomers and Seniors, ages 51 and older, are more likely to go online to access their Personal Health Records (PHR) than younger adults.
What is a Personal Health Record (PHR)?
From the
American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA)
The PHR is a tool that you can use to collect, track and share past and current information about your health or the health of someone in your care. Sometimes this information can save you the money and inconvenience of repeating routine medical tests. Even when routine procedures do need to be repeated, your PHR can give medical care providers more insight into your personal health story.
Remember, you are ultimately responsible for making decisions about your health. A PHR can help you accomplish that.
Important points to know about a Personal Health Record:
- You should always have access to your complete health information.
- Information in your PHR should be accurate, reliable, and complete.
- You should have control over how your health information is accessed, used, and disclosed.
- A PHR may be separate from and does not normally replace the legal medical record of any provider.
Medical records and your personal health record (PHR) are not the same thing. Medical records contain information about your health compiled and maintained by each of your healthcare providers. A PHR is information about your health compiled and maintained by you. The difference is in how you use your PHR to improve the quality of your healthcare.
Take an active role in monitoring your health and healthcare by creating your own PHR. PHRs are an inevitable and critical step in the evolution of health information management (HIM).
The most common health records recorded in a PHR are:
- List of significant illnesses and operations
- Medication Record
- Significant Family History of Disease
- Immunization Record
- Copies of Consent and Authorization Forms
For more information and to set up your PHR go to
http://www.myphr.com or contact your doctor to see if they have any plan for helping patients create personal health records (PHR).
I recently took my 90 year old mother to a new cardiologist and we were both unsure of information such as the dates of her surgeries, and the date of her stroke. This personal health record would be an enormous help, and we could track her list of medications there too which would be such a time saver.
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