SPOTLIGHT: HHS to study Medicare PHR usage

Well, unlike many IT vendors (not to mention countless publications), at least HHS can admit that it doesn't know enough about personal health records to draw conclusions. "We know very little about why consumers, and specifically Medicare beneficiaries, elect to use PHRs and what functionality they want from a PHR," HHS says in a recent Federal Register notice. And thus, the department will survey about 500 Medicare enrollees involved in a PHR pilot in Arizona and Utah to find out what benefits they get from PHRs and what difficulties they have encountered in using the records. Article