From the Department of Wishful Thinking and/or the Department of Things You Should Never Put Money On comes this stunning forecast: Adoption of personal health records (PHRs) could top 75 percent by 2020. Granted, that’s the most optimistic of three projections in a newly published Journal of Medical Internet Research article, but still.
I’ve been hearing for a decade or more how a boom in PHR adoptions was just around the corner. I even wrote an optimistic story myself back in 2007. I saw the light within a year after that.
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Ever since, whenever someone pitches me a story about a new PHR — particularly one untethered from an institutional electronic health record — I tell them to show me evidence that anyone is actually using it. Nine years later and I’m still waiting, though once in a while I soften up when I see an application that could help specific groups of patients.
So, about this JMIR study. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the National Cancer Institute and the Ohio State University extrapolated data from the NCI’s Health Information National Trends Survey, or HINTS. They came up with three different adoption scenarios, based on varying baseline dates.
In all three cases, projections outpace the PHR goals in the federal Meaningful Use health IT incentive program, so they suggest that policy-makers raise their own targets.
The researchers have reasons for aiming high. Some are valid. Others sound like they believe in unicorns.
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Understanding the trajectory of PHR uptake by consumers is important for policy makers, providers, and technology vendors. For policy makers, setting PHR usage targets based on quantified estimates rather than normative goals will ensure that targets are set at optimal levels to accelerate uptake, but not be unachievable. The provider community has been resistant to health information sharing. Having evidence that consumers are not only willing, but also able, to effectively use such tools may lower this resistance. In addition, having an active and growing market for PHR technologies should spur health information technology vendors to invest in research and development to take advantage of this burgeoning market.
It would be great to have lots of demand for PHRs. But they claim there already is a “burgeoning market” for PHRs? That’s hilarious.