Health insurance lobby unveils portable health record model.

Health insurers are developing a "personal health record" model that looks to standardize records to make them portable between health insurers, with the aim of reducing medical errors, showing people how to be healthier and cutting employers' health-care costs.

The eventual goal, according to a coalition of health insurers and industry groups, is to have a "frilly interoperable" health-care infrastructure for the United States by 2008.

The personal health record, or PHR model, unveiled at a press conference by America's Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, comes on the heels of recent disclosures by corporate giants such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Intel Corp. that they are rolling out digital health records for their own employees.

AHIP and BCBSA, however, say they have identified the core information that should be in those personal health records, and that they have developed and tested standards that will let people transfer their records between health insurance companies. "Efforts ... to provide consumers with portable PHRs are a step forward in the national health IT agenda," said Robert M. Kolodner, a health information technology coordinator at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The model PHR developed by AHIP and BCBSA is a Web-based tool maintained by insurers, which will hold a patient's claims data and administrative information. AHIP said the PHRs will let patients see their health information and manage it. The records will hold data such as benefits information, and reminders, orders and prescriptions, as well as patient-provided data, such as family histories, immunization records and health risk factors.

Because of the data contained in insurance claims, insurers are in the best position to provide the PHRs and get them up and running in the near future, the groups said. AHIP and BCBSA drew a distinction between PHRs and electronic health records, which they said are used by providers to store detailed clinical information.

About 70 million people now have PHRs through their health insurers, the groups said, and "millions more" will get them next year. AHIP said health insurers have set a goal of incorporating new, doctor-suggested data elements and making the PHRs portable from plan to plan by 2008.

In addition to officials from BCBSA, AHIP and HHS, the conference featured executives from Aetna and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, who said their companies are making PHRs available to their enrollees. There also will be a pilot program in two regions of the country sponsored by the National Health Council, a coalition of health agencies--such as the American Cancer Society and American Heart Association--nonprofits, and drug companies.

A report by the federal Institutes of Medicine suggests that digital health records may reduce costly and fatal medical errors.

In December 2006, five large companies--Applied Materials Inc., British Petroleum America Inc., Intel, Pitney Bowes Inc. and Wal-Mart--said they would start a nonprofit institute to develop a Web-based electronic health record for their 2.5 million employees with health coverage.

AHIP said the health insurance industry also has adopted a guideline that requires policyholders to approve the transfer of their health records from one insurer to another, with the transfer taking place after enrolling in the new plan.