Fast Relief for Long-Term Care Pain
What's so special about the Smart PHR™?
Caregiver Alliance Web Services™ operates the only consumer-controlled, interoperable personal health record system (PHR) with the security of online banking.
Americans' health records are scattered in fragments across many paper and electronic (EHR, EMR) record systems. Fragmented health records have been blamed for medical mistakes and for poor recovery from complex illness and ineffective long-term care of chronic illnesses and disabilities.
The Markle Foundation, in 2003, envisioned that improvements in long-term care could result from a personal health record (PHR) "that allows people to access and coordinate their lifelong health information and make appropriate parts of it available to those who need it."
PHRs products vary in consumer control—whether consumers determine who may access which data in their PHR records for what time periods. PHR products vary in interoperability—whether consumers have options for automated data exchange data between their PHRs and multiple doctors' EHRs. A PHR that is both consumer-controlled and interoperable has been called the holy grail.
There are four types of PHRs: (1) view, (2) tethered, (3) freestanding, and (4) consumer-controlled, interoperable. View PHRs give individuals glimpses of information in their records in an EHR system. Freestanding PHRs allow individuals to enter information into Web-accessible medical summary forms, print hard copies of the completed forms, and download the completed forms to a USB stick or other storage device. Tethered PHRs give individuals glimpses of selected information in their records in a networked database.
The patent-pending Smart PHR™ system is the first and only consumer-controlled, interoperable PHR system and it is operated with the security of online banking. The Smart PHR™ system gives consumers a centralized online bank vault. Individuals control who has access to what information in their PHR system records; they also control the exchange of information between their PHR system records and their records in other EHR and PHR systems.
Click here to download, as a PDF, an expanded discussion of PHRs.