MediConnect Global plans to offer free access to its 6 million PHRs (personal health records) to allow consumers to monitor their health independently.
Based in Salt Lake City, MediConnect retrieves, digitizes and manages health records for enterprises and consumers using Web-based workflows. The company’s PHR database is HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)-compliant, the company reports.
To use the service, customers enroll for a free myMediConnect account at www.mymediconnect.net. Customers then search for their name to see if the database contains their records.
The company has been compiling the database for a decade, and the PHRs encompass a patient’s complete record from multiple physicians, MediConnect reports.
Following the company’s acquisition of health portal PassportMD in January, it renamed its health record database myMediConnect.
The Obama administration has chosen MediConnect’s portal as one of four PHR systems to be included in a multiyear pilot initiative by CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid).
Patients can log in to myMediConnect on the desktop or on mobile devices such as the Apple iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Google Android handsets and HP/Palm WebOS smartphones.
Available information includes medical procedure history, records of prescriptions and diagnoses, medication reminders, fitness trackers and information from sources such as Harvard Health. Patients can even create grocery shopping lists.
Menu items within the application include Medicare Claims, Medical Conditions, Allergies, Procedures and Surgeries, Vaccinations, Doctors and Family/Social History.
MediConnect aims to keep PHRs easily comprehensible for patients, Amy Rees Anderson, CEO of MediConnect Global, told eWEEK. “It really helps the patient in a simplified way understand their health care,” Anderson said.
Patients control access to the data and provide a HIPAA key to providers when they want to share access to the records, according to Anderson.
Although the goal is to have patients take ownership of their health and manage the records on their own, nurses are available to summarize the data, she said.
Records created electronically will be available through myMediConnect as searchable structured data. Handwritten records or prescriptions will appear as PDFs, however. “Most come in on paper record,” Anderson said.
Users can import records from services such as Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health into the structured fields of a myMediConnect PHR.
In the future, MediConnect plans to add myMediConnect to the Nintendo Wii Fit game and incorporate data from medical devices such as pedometers and glucose meters.