We really don’t an high-sprung, alarmist debate on privacy. In Holland, this recently resulted in a shut-down of a system for sharing medical information that could have saved lifes.

If someone reads this: please help me comment this article. It is from the leading Swedish daily newspaper, written by it’s most influential columnist. And he got his facts wrong. It would be really bad for Swedish patients if these errors would spread. We really need systems for sharing health care information if we want to treat patients efficiently.

Google Health closes down next year. The reason is lack of interest:

There has been adoption among certain groups of users like tech-savvy patients and their caregivers, and more recently fitness and wellness enthusiasts. But we haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people.

At CompuGroup Medical, we really believe that Personal Health Records (PHRs) are a good idea. In fact, we believe it so much that we have invested in patented technology to keep them really safe. This includes clever PKI technology that ensures that only the patient and whomever the patients allows can access it (not even db-admins).

Shahid’s take is that the value is simply not there in the Google’s version of a PHR. People are not interested in just keeping score of a bunch of measurements.

I think this this an important signal to us working with PHRs. We must not be blinded to believe that users will come running just because we bring out a nice and clever web site.

I’ve started talking to customers in Sweden about our Software Assisted Medicine (SAM) concept. This is currently in pilot testing for diabetes patients in Germany, and has been approved according to Meaningful Use in the US. The system has the capability to include everyone involved, including GPs, specialists, medical guideline-makers, insurance companies and – of course – the patient. It is integrated in the EMR and makes recommendations according to nationally accepted medical guidelines based on medical data and information from the patient. It can keep track of self-treatment programs, appointments etc.

Implementing such a system will be challenging because it involves many parties. But we think we actually can pull it off because we have EMR’s in place with huge amounts of usable medical information (for example CGM TakeCare in Stockholm with 2,5 million patients in one db).

There is still lot’s of opportunities to breathe life into the PHR!

One of the many conclusions in the new big eHealth Benchmarking report is that EHR:s are in place but their usage is low.

Amen to that. We suppliers see it all the time: the things we build are not used. Sometimes, of course, they’re badly built – we have lots of areas to improve. But it is very common that even our best stuff simply isn’t implemented on the floor.

My opinion: there is far too much focus (ie resources) on developing new functionality compared to the focus on reaping the benefits of the systems that already exists.