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Thu, Feb 28 01:10 AM

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Globalised healthcare business needed an interface to connect the consumer with the myriad healthcare agencies and the World Wide Web yet again came to rescue. An experiment, started in 2006 In India, now seems to have inspired the global IT major Google to start a pilot project in Cleveland.

It is called personal health record (PHR), a web space dedicated to the health needs of a consumer to store, upload, share, refer any medical data from multifarious agencies like doctors, hospitals, pharmacists, pathology labs and insurance companies. A registered consumer has a password to log into his 'medical web space' which will contain all test results, doctors' remarks and diagnosis, referrals.

In case of multidisciplinary treatment, doctors can discuss about the patient and exchange opinion. Pharmacists can link their system to this space to upload medical bills, details of medication purchased.

The future will have much more, including medication and routine tests alerts for chronic patients, sharing information with doctors and getting his recommendations in writing over the Internet and tie-ups with insurance companies since all the data will be in sequence and can be processed as official documents. Yos technologies, which started this interface in India in 2006, already has over 25,000 customers in their network.

Google, the US-based IT major, announced a pilot project last week involving 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who agree to participate in their PHR program. Google's PHR, which is still in development, will be introduced publicly and made widely available after the completion of the six-to eight-week pilot, Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, was quoted saying.

According to founder CEO of Yos, Vijaya Verma claimed that she was planning to apply for patents for the unique interfaces like SMS alerts linked to the PHR and tie-ups with pharmacies and pathology labs. "This has not yet been done anywhere in the world, which we are in the process of starting soon.

We have already tied up with hospitals which will use this interface," she told HT from Bangalore. According to Verma, there can be many PHR service providers as it promises to be a great unifying factor for the healthcare industry.

"Each stakeholder will operate through a single common platform," she said. Involve doctors were proving difficult, Verma claimed.

But slowly the medical fraternity was also realising the advantages of PHR. "I feel it is the next big thing in healthcare. For complex, long-term, multidisciplinary treatment, this will serve as a great boon to the patients.

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