Children's Hospital Boston creates interoperability via patient portal

Get ready for more alphabet soup. The latest acronym in health IT is PCHR, short for personally controlled health record. It's the brainchild of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at Children's Hospital Boston as a means of aggregating and exchanging clinical data between Children's ambulatory units and the primary care departments at the affiliated Pediatric Physicians' Organization at Children's.

Patients--and, presumably, their parents--can view their combined records via the hospital's MyChildren's patient portal, launched earlier this year as an outgrowth of the informatics program's home-grown Indivo EMR system. "We built MyChildren's around Indivo to put patients in control of their health information and give them the opportunity to create a single, secure, unified view of their records," emergency physician Dr. Kenneth Mandl, a co-founder of Indivo, says. "For physicians, PCHRs promise to be an integrated source of a patient's healthcare information, ensuring the data are in the right place at the right time--something that is oftentimes absent in today's healthcare environment."

Ambulatory EMR vendor eClinicalWorks, will provide interoperability technology to help create community-wide records, reports Healthcare IT News.

To learn more about the PCHR and integration programs at Children's:
- check out this Healthcare IT News story