WASHINGTON – Building on the strength of its extensive electronic medical record system, Kaiser Permanente’s personal health record has streamlined many daily functions for its physicians and members.
The personal health record (PHR), called My Health Manager, has attracted 3 million Kaiser members to register at KP.org, the site hosting the PHR. Each month, patients refill more than half a million prescriptions, review 1.2 million test results, make more than 100,000 clinic appointments, and exchange approximately 800,000 secure messages with their physicians and other providers.
The PHR effort is closely tied to Kaiser’s electronic medical record, HealthConnect, which serves all of its 431 clinics and 35 medical centers.
“Adding the PHR ended up being part of our EMR culture change,” Jan Oldenburg, senior practice leader with the Kaiser Permanente Internet Services Group, said at a conference sponsored by the American Medical Association and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.
At the outset of the PHR program, some Kaiser physicians were afraid that patients wouldn’t cooperate, or alternatively, that they might get too involved in managing their health data.
For example, Ms. Oldenburg said, some physicians argued that their older, sicker patients would never log on. Others feared that if patients were presented with abnormal lab results, their call volume would go through the roof.
However, Kaiser studies have concluded that neither calls nor e-mails to physicians have increased since My Health Manager was rolled out, Ms. Oldenburg said, adding that more than 40% of Kaiser’s Medicare population have become active PHR users.
Indeed, the PHR has actually helped physicians run their practices more effectively, according to Ms. Oldenburg. “There have been studies which show reductions in office visits,” as well as an improvement in the overall health of the PHR-using population.
My Health Manager is particularly popular with some subsets of Kaiser members, Ms. Oldenburg said, noting that 48% of registered PHR users are 40-64 years old and another 30% are 24-39 years old.
Still, PHR use seems to cut across a broad age range. For example, members aged 21-71 made some use of the system, such as viewing lab tests online. Users aged 51-60, meanwhile, had the highest usage rate at 23%. Kaiser data also suggests that PHR users are more likely to stay with Kaiser when given a chance to switch.
To build the base of registered PHR users, Kaiser has conducted an extensive marketing campaign using virtually every channel imaginable. “We used as many touch points as possible,” Ms. Oldenburg said. “That includes television, radio advertisements, posters in laboratories, cards physicians can hand out which explain the benefits of the PHR, and more. We pretty much put the message everywhere.”
The results have been dramatic. Between 2005 and 2009, the number of patient sign-ins has shot up from 5 million to 51.6 million, Ms. Oldenburg said.