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Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Kaiser Survey Links Portal Use With Improved Perceptions of Health | Healthcare Informatics Magazine | Health IT | Information Technology

Kaiser Survey Links Portal Use With Improved Perceptions of Health | Healthcare Informatics Magazine | Health IT | Information Technology

I posted this link automatically after the story turned up in my google search RSS feed. The website with this Kaiser Survey story had over 280 reference (or Add This ) RSS icon links for sharing the story. I often share stories to my Twitter feed which also has an eHealth theme. My Facebook feed is mostly for personal stories. I can remember before Facebook when RSS was just developing, what a liberation it was from the inbox. Some email programs had a way to receive RSS feeds into a local folder or there was a browser navigation item where one could store the RSS links, kind of like bookmarks. These days I am told that the younger kids don't even read email - they are just message chatting on their smartphones or other social media sites. I still think RSS - Real Simple Syndication - is the greatest technological invention since newspaper publishing. In fact, I have "health informatics" set in a google search feed, which is just an RSS program.

RSS is programmed in XML. I took a course in XML once and started creating my own RSS feeds on the websites I had created. It was not that difficult. XML is also the basis for the HL7 standard for health records and interoperability. It is too bad that more personalized RSS "news" doesn't come into our google or other email accounts in terms of our own personal health records. I personally don't see the interoperable difficulty in doing that. Add to that developments in "web services", API, and inter-database sharing platforms like REST, and there are a lot of open doors for data sharing.

This eHealth enabled browser blog is dedicated to eHealth. Personal health records are a major interest that I like to share with others. After doing research for 5 years on PHR I still think they have many decades to go before they will be widely used. I could be mistaken here, but I just don't think the technology is ripe for wide spread PHR use. It is just not the technology, it is also the social awareness of health and wellness that is lacking.  Newer forms of technology might enable an evolution of this awareness - hard to say. A friend of mine who I follow on Facebook recalled the time in his university in 1990 when he and a colleague decide to get email accounts so they could stay in touch. They could not convince anyone else to use email because no one could see the reason for using a technology that no one else was using.

To get back to this story about the Kaiser Survey that showed that people thought that their health was improving because of using a PHR, I think that there is a need to find more evidence that PHRs can be a technological tool physicians may ultimately prescribe to help their patients. 

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