Creating and Storing Personal Health Information in the Digital Age

There are two major digital systems for creating and storing personal health information: personal health records (PHR)

PHR. As the name implies, a PHR is an electronic record of your entire health history'created and maintained by you. Paper forms of health history records have existed for many years, but maintaining and storing such records are fraught with problems because files can get lost, be difficult to retrieve and/or require extra storage space.

PHRs provide you with ownership of your health information and allow you to share information with multiple healthcare providers. You can create and store the records on your home computer and download them to a small storage device such as a thumb drive, or upload them to one of several websites. Many health insurance companies and medical information sites, such as WebMD and even Medicare.gov, have PHR record-keeping options. A functioning model of such electronic information sharing, which patients can readily use, is the MyHealtheVet website, introduced by the U.S. Departent of Veterans Affairs (VA) in 2010 (Turvey). In a survey of 18,471 PHR users in the VA system, most respondents were interested in sharing access to their electronic health information with caregivers and non-VA providers (Zulman).