A Patient-Centered Health Record in a Demonstration Regional Health Information Network

A personal health record (PHR) is a patient-created, patient-maintained record that patients can make available to their health care providers. This paper discusses an online PHR system, the patient-centered health record (PcHR), that was created by a research group at the University of Washington. The PcHR system was incorporated in the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) Interoperability Showcase at the 2005 Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference. The showcase provided an opportunity to test the feasibility of integrating patient-centered and provider-centered information systems. Using the PcHR, the patient´s own record of their health information was integrated into two clinical scenarios that involved exchanging health records with traditional clinical information systems. Using the Continuity of Care Record standard (CCR), a personal health record created through the PcHR system was successfully shared across the IHE demonstration regional health information network (RHIN) and the patient´s health information viewed in several commercial clinical information systems. Similarly, provider records were viewed from within the patient´s record