AHIC votes for PHR certification.

While the American Health Information Community (AHIC) voted unanimously in favor of a recommendation for certification of personal health records (PHRs), five AHIC Consumer Empowerment Workgroup members disagreed. Among the dissenters were David Lanskey of the Markle Foundation, Stephen Dowd of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, JP Little of RxHub, Steve Shihadeh of Microsoft and Myrl Weinberg of the National Health Council. All five signed a dissent letter to HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt. Dissenters collectively felt that it is too early for government involvement in PHRs, while advocates felt it would help push them through to realization. One concern about PHRs is that many are not regulated under privacy rules promulgated after passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

David Lansky noted that his colleagues on the AHIC work group on confidentiality, privacy and security have spent time working on security function recommendations that impact identity authentication of a user of a healthcare IT system. According to Lansky, there is a difference between best practices, which are how users interact with a system, and functions that can be coded into a system's software. Secretary Leavitt, who presided over the meeting, acknowledged that this would not be the last time the workgroup will disagree. The combined meeting and teleconference was open to the public via an HHS Webcast. The Consumer Empowerment Workgroup is one of seven such working committees under the umbrella of the American Health Information Community, a public-private advisory panel appointed by Leavitt in 2005.