"Information keeps people involved. Information is an integral part of consumers making rational decisions and choices."

President George Bush spoke these words recently on April 5, 2006 at a Panel on Health Savings Accounts at Playhouse on the Green in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

An electronic personal health record (PHR) can give patients online access to all their personal health cre information.  Patients can print their health information, take it with them to their doctor appointments, put it onto their PDA, and potentially transfer it to their preferred physician's electronic health record system.

Indivo (formerly PING) is the world's first personally controlled record system, enabling a patient to own a complete, secure, copy of her medical record, integrating health information across sites of care and over time.  As more patients are turning to the web for information about their medical conditions; the same level of control that consumers have to manage their money and purchases, can be extended to an online health  record.

I3 will implement Indivo locally as a patient portal, and, if possible, create a linkage to one local hospital's clinical data repository.  We will provide authentication to local provider's offices for 50 patients.  In addition to ongoing feedback, we will survey the patient users and their physicians for their opinions of personal health records in general, and Indivo, in particular.

Indivo

With Next Generation funding from NLM, The Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP) developed Indivo, the world's first personally controlled personal health record system.  It enables patients to own complete, secure copies of their medical records and integrates health information across sites of care and over time.  Indivo is built to public standards as an open-source application platform to facilitate ease of use.  CHIP is a multidisciplinary applied research program at Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Sciences and Technology.

The Indivo system integrates a patient's health information across sites of care and over time and enables a patient to own a complete and secure copy of their medical record.  Since the medical record resides with the patient, in an opposite approach to the long-standing medical record model, permissions are granted to institutions, clinicians, researchers and other users of the patient's medical information by the patient or their designated proxy.

The creation of the Indivo portal, while not a new concept, is innovative in its integration with a community wide health information network.  Establishing this portal promises to improve health literacy among the patient populations while fostering physician-patient communication.  Providing that the proposed evaluation proves the efficacy of this approach, it could serve as a model for other institutions and communities.

Further reading and peer reviewed articles:

• Documentation can be found at http://www.indivohealth.org/pages/docstandard
• Guiding principles in the 2001 BMJ paper:  "Public standards and patients' control: how to keep electronic medical records accessible but private: ...read more on concept
• System architecture in the 2004 JAMIA paper: "The PING Personally Controlled Electronic Medical Record System: Technical Architecture: ...read more on architecture