CMS kicked off PHR Pilot in Arizona and Utah

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) officially launched a PHR pilot on Tuesday in the states of Arizona and Utah. According to the design of the pilot, it will run for about a year before CMS considers the next stage. Four PHR service providers, including Google Health, HealthTrio, NoMoreClipboard, and PassportMD, contracted with CMS on this pilot. These providers will compete with one another in these two states trying to sign up users. To incentivize providers as well as potential users, CMS promises to transfer up to two-year claim data from Medicare to one of the four player’s ePHR system. As a side note, the pilot targets the traditional Medicare fee-for-service population.

The CMS pilot is an investment in brand building for these PHR providers in the first place. If they are successful, CMS could continue to hire them in the future. Even if the pilot ends with no renewal, they can still use the experience to promote their services to other clients. The challenges for these vendors are significant too. To start with, managing the Medicare fee-for-service population is an arduous task. The user satisfaction score will be one of the most important evaluation criteria for CMS. Engaging these seniors so that they will continue using the PHR tools throughout the pilot period is critical to high user satisfaction. Finally the multi-vendor approach by CMS could also test the interoperability of these services. Will a user be able to transfer his medical data from one provider to another if he is not satisfied? How smooth will that experience be? These questions can be headaches for these providers and CMS clearly do not want to meddle with them.

This pilot is equally important for the PHR technology industry. Successful completion of the pilot could lead to future funding efforts from CMS to extend the program to other states. CMS’ endorsement would have a ripple effect on the private sector as CMS usually wields high influence on the policies of the private insurance sector.

Continua Health Alliance Added Dossia and Google as New Members, Announced Public Demo

Continua Health Alliance, a consortium for advancing technology adoption in the healthcare industry, announced this past Tuesday that Dossia and Google are joining the organization. For those who are not familiar with Dossia, it is a consortium made of many large self-insured employers and devoted to create personal health records (PHR) for their employees. Its members include AT&T, Wal-Mart, Cardinal Health, Intel, BP, Applied Materials, etc. Google, as we all know, introduced its Google Health platform in May 2008, and its new-found connection with Continua aims to offer consumers the ability to upload health data from home monitoring devices to Google-powered online health data banks.

This is a positive development for the personal health care industry. Personal health data collected by home health monitoring devices do not provide much value to patients and doctors if they remain locked in the devices. With access to personal health records and an expanding list of tools to interact with the data, consumers, with the help of their doctors, can unlock the value of this information and make smart decisions on their health. Google Health and Dossia’s personal health record database and application tools can serve this purpose well. Both have made progress in the past several months. Wal-Mart has started to expand use of Dossia’s PHR from a trial group to all its employees. Other Dossia members are said to take similar steps soon. Google Health, on the other hand, has forged partnerships with major drug stores, pharmacy benefit management firms, healthcare provider groups, and lab testing companies since its debut. Working with Continua is another step to add value to their respective platforms. In this embryonic healthcare industry segment, this type of collaboration, instead of competition, is much needed.

The news also caused me to think of another active participant in the personal health record business: Microsoft’s HealthVault division. HealthVault in recent month has gained great momentum regarding expanding its influence and attracting endorsement. The latest move with Aetna, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, was also good indication of the traction it scored with the health payer groups. In public presentations, HealthVault stated the same vision of connecting home health monitoring devices with its platforms, but it hasn’t joined Continua yet. Rather, it is working with individual companies on specific applications, at least for now. Is Google and Dossia’s partnership with Continua a turn-on or turn-off for HealthVault? We will see whether Microsoft will mandate its applications’ compatibility with Continua’s technology standards.

Speaking of standards, Continua also announced that its members will demonstrate interoperability among pre-certified products and services based on Continua’s standards on Oct 27, 2008 at the Partners Healthcare’s Annual Symposium event. I will host a panel discussion at that event on the emerging Medical Home model. BTW, when will we see collaboration between the Continua and the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative (PCPCC)?

Google Will See You Now

After a trial run with Cleveland Clinic, Google Health is now open for business. Designed as a free full personal health record (PHR), Google Health allows individuals to create their own profile complete with records of conditions, medications, allergies, procedures, test results, and immunizations. Intended to be a one-stop shop for people to store all medical information from the numerous institutes they visit, control is given to the individual. (It is important to note, however, that Google Health is not covered under the HIPAA privacy code.)

Partners with Google provide services to Google Health users that compliment their PHR experience. For a fee and with permission to access your account, several companies will collect an individual’s medical records from various sources and convert them to electronic format where they can be stored on disk or uploaded to the PHR. Added to these vendors are assorted other partners who create easy access for communicating with physicians, keep tabs on medicines or diabetes monitoring, provide health calculators, and search the web for information related to the individual’s personal needs.

Google Health has also partnered with several pharmacies and clinics such as Walgreens and the CVS subsidiary Minute Clinic to allow medical records to be imported into the PHR. Once in the system, the drug interactions tab is marked with a red dot for immediate attention if it detects use of medicines that have negative interactions with each other or are one to which the person is allergic. A yellow triangle flags marks concerns that should be discussed soon with the doctor.

Need a doctor? Click the link to search providers by specialty. View doctors in the area, see others’ reviews of the doctor, and map a way to the office. Need information about a specific condition? Use the search tool to find what you need. With no claims to file and no copays, Google is free to both individuals and the healthcare providers that partner with Google.