Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

A PHR company’s contrarian proposal: Build for the reality that interoperability may not happen

For all of the personal health record companies out there, one called ChartSpan Medical Technologies […]

For all of the personal health record companies out there, one called ChartSpan Medical Technologies caught my eye today. Its claim to fame is that it’s a “fully automated PHR app.” By that, the company means that users can upload email files or photos of their health records to the app, and it converts the contents into structured data. The app then organizes and stores a whole family’s data in the form of PHRs.

But wait, you say. That’s not fully automated. A truly automated PHR would pull in data from the EMR systems of a person’s doctors without any efforts by the user herself.

Yes, responds ChartSpan co-founder and CEO Jon-Michial Carter, but it’s time to start getting real about whether that’s actually going to happen, at least any time soon.

“Interoperability has been a goal for years, but it hasn’t been achieved,” Carter explained.  “We all know the technology exists today to make universal interoperability happen, but if we have free access to our healthcare records as patients, a lot of people don’t make money. I just get frustrated by the disingenuous conversations about it.”

He added that his team is a big fan of Blue Button, and if it became more pervasive the company would definitely work to accommodate what that technology could do. “But the truth is, 99 percent of the time we’re handed a piece of paper when we request our healthcare records. We want to accommodate that process today,” he said.

Carter’s young company today announced it closed a pre-seed funding round totaling just under $250,000. The round was led by Don Byrne, an entrepreneur in GI endoscopy who founded Byrne Medical (now Medivators), with participation from Carter and the Iron Yard Digital Healthcare Accelerator, the company said.

ChartSpan’s PHR is based on proprietary optical character recognition that lifts data from an image or file and converts it digital data. But the PHR, which can be used on a smartphone, tablet or computer, also attaches that original picture or record to the data it extracts. Users then can send the original record to a specialist, or send an original copy of an immunization record to a child’s nurse at school, and they can send it by fax or email from the app.

The ultimate goal is to be part of a paradigm shift that makes the patient the repository of healthcare information, rather than a provider, Carter stated. “Right now, a provider-based EHR can’t import API data from a fitness band or glucose reader, but a patient can,” he pointed out. “A provider today can’t take your human genome API and import it into their EHR, but a patient can. Patients can push their PHR data to anyone they want, but doctors can’t.  We get that providers need to have that information, but who is really in a better position to manage that data?”

The ChartSpan PHR is set to launch in Q4 of this year. Until then, the Houston-based company is wrapping up at the Iron Yard Digital Healthcare Accelerator in South Carolina.

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