Personal Health Records - Like having a Healthcare Escrow Account

When you stop and think about it, there are some real similarities here.  Anyone who has ever purchased property knows what an Escrow account is.  It is a third party used to to hold money and release it to fund a loan, until everything is verified and the loan process completes. 

Personal Health Records (PHR) can be viewed much in the same light when you stop and think about it.  There are more vendors coming on the market every day with services to help you.  My own personal opinion  is that I tend to lean towards companies like Google Health and the Microsoft HealthVault.  Why?  They are offering a place, a safe haven on a server to create a place to store records.  Sure they both have agreements with Healthcare vendors, who are making it easy for the consumer to have the information populated, which is huge, who has the time or the resources to do all of this yourself and have an accurate credible record? 

It comes back around to who do you trust, thus some of the other offers out there could be a little less appealing when it comes down to trusting an insurance company for example that is directly involved in the payment of health claims.  Sure you can't denounce anyone for trying to come up with a solution, but what is best for you, as a consumer?  It is nice to have claim and healthcare information imported in to a health care records from the insurers, so one does have a more complete record, but where's the strength with the rest of the process? 

Google Health and Microsoft are actively adding more healthcare vendors to participate in the programs all the time.  Thus I tend to look at both programs as more of an "escrow" account, the 3rd party offering the service without a real conflict of interest or monetary gains at stake due to anything that would be included in my records.  One more item to think about as well is reputation, do people trust Google and Microsoft?  Take a look around the web and do some checking for yourself if you have questions and you will usually find some pretty good responses from both and neither one charges for the basic services of storing your health records. 

So that is how I see the personal health record, an escrow account where you have control over what is shared and with whom.  If you haven't taken a look around yet, there are links on this site to both services.  A PHR can be like having your own personal health escrow account.  BD 

Read the complete post at http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2008/09/personal-health-records-like-having.html