One personal health record dies, another Thrives

Myself and others I know received this e-mail message this morning:

Thank you for being a loyal user of the Revolution Health Personal Health Record. Unfortunately we will be discontinuing this service as of the end of February 2010 and removing all records, information, and data from the Revolution Health Web site.

So that you don’t lose the information you’ve entered into the system, we strongly suggest that you download your personal records as a PDF to print and save for future reference. To do this, simply follow these instructions:

  1. Log in to your Personal Health Record.
  2. From any page of your record, click on the “printable version” link on the top right corner of any page. When you see a pop-up box asking you to “Select the following sections to include in your print out,” simply make sure that the sections you want to print and save are checked and then click the “Submit” button.
  3. Once the PDF is created (this only takes a moment), you can print directly from it and/or save it to your computer. To print the PDF, click on the printer icon at the top left of the page. To save it, click on the disk icon to the right of the printer icon.

If you encounter a problem printing or saving your records, please e-mail our customer service department at [email protected] for assistance. Even after the Personal Health Record is no longer available, Revolution Health and our partner sites will continue to offer you the same great health information and community pages as always. We hope you continue to visit Revolution Health often to take advantage of our offerings.

Thank you,
The Revolution Health Team

The irony is that this message comes on day #2 of the national meeting of physician and other Kaiser Permanente leaders involved in supporting My health manager at kp.org, Kaiser Permanente’s personal health record.

As I asked people here what they learned in day 1, it’s basically the opposite of what is expressed in the message above. This is a personal health record that is thriving, with demand from members/patients continually increasing, and an internet services group working as hard as ever to deliver next-generation services. If anything, they have not appreciated how successful this personal record has become, and this discussion allowed them to stop for a brief moment and appreciate.

Here’s a slide from a recent presentation showing the growth in use:

Eytan - Informatics for Consumer Health - 06

I hope that people receiving the quoted message do not see this as a sign that personal health records are not desired or wanted by patients. The opposite is very much true. The difference is that a personal health record that provides what people want is something that is wanted (I know, obvious). Such a thing exists. Ask for it where you deliver or receive care.

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Ted Eytan, MD