By  Diana Manos, Senior Editor

　　Despite all the current focus on interoperability of electronic health records, there is no doubt that personalized health records will become more than an afterthought as time goes on.

　　“There are many parts of the puzzle we are trying to adopt and PHRs will clearly be a major part of it,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, MD, said last month at an American Health Information Community meeting.

　　At the Health Information and Management Systems Society's annual conference held in February in New Orleans, Robert Kolodner, interim national coordinator for healthcare IT, said he expects the advancement of PHRs to be the precursor that drives President Bush's goal that most Americans have an electronic medical record by 2014.

　　Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I. ) last month introduced the Personalized Health Information Act, which would require the government to create a public-private PHR incentive program and trust fund to pay physicians for enrolling patients in a PHR.

　　Rose Marie Robertson, MD, chief science officer of the American Heart Association, says it's a good idea. PHRs could be the key to improving the health of patients with chronic care conditions, such as heart disease.

　　In a Health Affairs interview conducted in February, former national healthcare IT coordinator David Brailer said healthcare information technology could help reduce healthcare spending up to 50 percent – but only if, among other things, providers give control of clinical information to patients.

　　Here's the rub.

　　There are those who say the government's definition of “control” is a far cry from how patients would define it.

　　Deborah C. Peel, MD, chairwoman of the nonprofit Patient Privacy Rights, in a response to Brailer, said, “His view is that HIT will give consumers control by informing their decisions about their health and who treats them. Being informed about health and who treats you is neither privacy nor control.”

　　Even as PHRs bubble to the surface as a good idea, there is contention over the privacy issues they evoke. Paul Feldman, deputy director of the non-profit Health Privacy Project, stepped down as co-chairman of the AHIC Confidentiality, Privacy and Security Workgroup in February over dissatisfaction with the progress of consumer privacy protection.

　　“We already know that the majority of people in this country fear that their health information is more prone to misuse in electronic form; we must not shirk our duty to protect them from such harm,” Feldman said in his resignation letter.