My doctor opens a personal healthcare portal

This has been a historic week for healthcare in the United States, with the passage of the Health Care Reform bill. Just recently my doctor's practice instituted a personal healthcare portal for each patient, a fairly significant move in itself, I would say. As I was checking in for blood work a couple of weeks ago I was asked if I had Internet access. When I replied in the affirmative, I was handed a pink piece of paper with instructions for logging into the portal. 

That my doctor's healthcare group was willing to provide this information online is a huge step for them. They already had switched to electronic medical records (as I wrote in "A doctor's view of the electronic medical records plan"), but this was something entirely different. It was a foray into the cloud with people's personal medical information. 

Brave move

For my small healthcare provider this was a bold move. They were willing to take a step into cloud computing, something many medical professionals are afraid to do. Just today, my colleague Davey Winder wrote a column on Microsoft.com explaining that, in England at least, not everyone is as brave as my doctor's practice. The question is: Can people handle it and can they keep this information secure?

Being a guy who loves technology solutions, I naturally took the plunge the very afternoon I received the instructions. With my pink sheet in hand, I dutifully followed the steps. They required a 10 digit (that's all numbers) sign-on. Makes for more security, but also harder to remember, especially for those elders out there. As added security, you also need to enter your phone number and date of birth each time you log on. The first time, you access the portal, you receive a phone call with a special code that you must enter to get in. But without much difficulty, I was able to sign in and see what types of information my doctor was providing for me.

The contents

What I found was the following:

• Basic information about me like my name and phone number
• My list of upcoming appointments (very useful)
• The ability to make appointments through the portal (useful, but still a bit awkward in implementation)
• Access to a health and wellness database (trusted medical information is hard to find on the internet, so should be useful)
• Billing information (but no way to pay online)

The portal home page claims it also includes lab results, but I have yet to see that information on there just yet.

Moving medical information online

There are of course huge implications to moving this type of information into the cloud. Leaks can and do happen, but I think in this implementation at least, they have been cautious enough both in terms of security and the amount of information they are making available online. Whether I would want my entire medical record online is another matter entirely, especially if it were sitting on Microsoft's or Google's servers, but I do believe that individuals should have access to their own personal medical information, and this is a great starting point. - Ron