National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Abstract
President Bush and Secretary Leavitt have put forward a vision that, in the Secretary\ue2\u20ac\u2122s words, \ue2\u20ac\u153would create a personal health record that patients, doctors and other health care providers could securely access through the Internet no matter where a patient is seeking medical care.\ue2\u20ac? The National Health Information Infrastructure Workgroup of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics (NCVHS) held six hearings on personal health records (PHRs) and PHR systems in 2002-2005. On the basis of those hearings, the Workgroup developed a letter report with twenty recommendations that it sent to the Secretary in September 2005. Citing the role PHR systems could play in improving health and healthcare and furthering the broad health information technology agenda, the letter report urges the Secretary to exercise leadership and give priority to developing PHRs and PHR systems, consistent with the Committee\ue2\u20ac\u2122s recommendations. The present report is a slightly expanded version of the letter report sent to the Secretary. Although substantively unchanged, it adds clarifying information for a broader audience.Acknowledgements -- Executive summary -- Background -- Personal Health records are evolving in concept and practice (Recommendations 1-2) -- Personal health record systems\ue2\u20ac\u2122 value depends on users, sponsors, and functionality -- Privacy (Recommendations 3-7) -- Security requirements (Recommendations 8-9) -- Interoperability (Recommendations 10-14) -- Federal Roles in PHR systems, internal and external (Recommendations 15-16) -- Advancing research and evaluation on PHR systems (Recommendations 17-20) -- Next steps for NCVHS"Developed by the Workgroup on the National Health Information Infrastructure (NHII) of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics"--P. 2.Also available via the World Wide Web.Includes bibliographical references
