Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Personal Health Records (PHRs), Google Health Is One Of The Choices.

Personal Health Records (PHRs)
I read in Google blog today that Google Health is participating with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), on a pilot program in Arizona and Utah. The program is for Medicare beneficiaries to bring their Medicare claims data into Google Health.
Medicare Claims data is much more complex than they appear in words of our mouths or brains. There are zillions of codes to follow, comparisons and recheck denials, all of these are important to both health care providers and to receivers.
So having these data online accessible from anywhere to people and entities that have rights to access the data is a great benefit.
I do not work with Healthcare itself but I do deal with healthcare data. I see the complexities, I help to resolve bottlenecks. As the author of the blog article I am reffering to explained, Medicare data carries a great wealth of data about health of medicare reciepants. Having access to this data, will be a great benefit to the people involved.
The Utah Arizona Pilot that Google Health is involved is a perfect way to find out the benefis of this information. The participants has a choice among four PHR vendors participating in the Medicare PHR Choice (Links are through CMS): Only traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare beneficiaries with a primary residence in Arizona and Utah are eligible to participate in this pilot but there are more than one million eligibale people there.
Medicare will only be sending data to your Account (They will not access the data). Beneficiaries who participate in the pilot will still have access to data imported into their Google Health Accounts after the conclusion of the pilot and with the Google Health sharing feature, any beneficiary enrolled in this pilot can now share this data with family members and doctors in their care network.

Official Google Blog: Getting your Medicare records in Google Health


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