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 You can transfer your health data to another personal health record provider such as Microsoft HealthVault. What privacy issues are involved? Express your views on using this type of system, make sure to include the potential benefits and risks. 

Reply-1(Shiva)

Electronic personal health record systems (PHRs) are introduced to develop patient-centered health care by providing medical records and other required information accessible to patients with the idea of helping patients in health self-management. There is a number of different fundamental designs for PHRs. As primary care physicians will play a major role in patient health, PHRs are also to be linked to physician’s electronic medical record systems, so the adoption of PHRs dependent on growth in electronic medical record adoption. Also, many PHRs are physician-oriented and which does not include patient orientated functionalities. PHRs need to provide to support self-management and disease prevention if improvements in health outcomes are to be expected.

There has been a surge in activity around the adoption of PHRs for patients and consumers. There are some issues surrounding PHRs where they are more than just a static repository for patient’s data, they help combine data and convert that into information and provide knowledge which helps patients to participate actively in their own care.

Benefits:

PHRs have a wide variety of potential benefits for consumers. Out of it one of the most important PHR benefits is it has greater patient access to wide array of useful health data, information, and knowledge. Patients can use that to improve their health and manage their diseases. Those kinds of information are highly customized to make PHRs more successful and useful. Patients with illness will be able to track their diseases in conjunction with the providers, by providing earlier help when they see a problem. PHRs will help in improving communication between patients and caregivers which will make it easier for patients and caregivers to ask general questions, to request refills, to set up appointments and also to report problems. PHRs will also benefits to the payers and purchasers for health care include lower diseases, lower management cost, lower medication cost.

Risks:

Although there are many benefits to a PHR system, which may also include some risks. Like, it is very difficult and time consuming to collect all current and past medical information. Patients have to request information from multiple health providers to get complete medical history. Once all the information is collected patients must manual enter the data into their PHR.

References

Tang, C. P, Ash, S. J., & Bates, W. D. (2006). Personal health records: definitions, benefits, and strategies for overcoming barriers to adoption. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 13(2), 121-126. doi: 10.1197/jamia.M2025.

Zacher, J. (2016). Benefits, risks, and drawbacks of an electronic personal health record. Retrieved from https://www.centerpointclinicalservices.com/blog-posts/benefits-risks-and-drawbacks-of-an-electronic-personal-health-record/

Reply-2(Aarthi )

Personal Health records are a repository that stores patient’s health related data, an electronic application through which an individual can access, manage and share their health data to others.

Some of the privacy issues that concerns PHR are if the PHR system is hacked and the data is modified, doctors can’t be sure of the accurate data. Since the data can be shared with multiple people, PHR users are not notified when their data is exposed. Additionally, sharing data in case of emergency , it is more likely that data breaches might happen.

Some of the benefits of using PHR are that users can grant or revoke access to their data. It allows more flexibility around what to share, whom to share and at what level. It grants access to patients to a large health information and knowledge. Patients can leverage the access to manage their health issues.Patients will be able to track diseases in parallel with the providers which enables them to act on it on time.

Some of the potential risks with PHR are there is a possibility of inaccurate information if the individual is not pro active in updating their records from time to time. This might cause legal issues for the providers if they rely entirely on the information on the records. Both providers and consumers must trust each other regarding the usage and integrity of the data.

References:

1. Retrieved from : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447551/

2. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3510685/