Health News and Scoops

MMR Information Systems, Inc., which through its wholly-owned operating subsidiary, MyMedicalRecords, Inc. (collectively, “MMR”) provides consumer-controlled Personal Health Records (“PHRs”) (www.mymedicalrecords.com) and electronic safe deposit box storage solutions (www.myesafedepositbox.com), offered an extensive demonstration of its new MyMedicalRecords Pro (“MMR Pro”) electronic medical record storage system and integrated MMRPatientView PHR product for doctor offices and their patients at the annual Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) show in Chicago.

The system gives physicians the ability to generate ongoing revenues by enabling patients an upgrade option to a MyMedicalRecords Personal Health Record. MMR believes the system is being designed to comply with standards necessary for physicians to receive qualifying reimbursement for installation and integration from stimulus monies.

The MMR Pro service is designed to help doctors, particularly sole practitioners and small group practices, better manage their paper records by scanning those records to a secure Web-based portal at www.mymedicalrecordsmd.com, where they are viewable by the doctor 24/7 from any Internet-connected computer. Scanned records are automatically placed in designated folders that correspond with the tabs in a patient chart.

The doctor also is able to share records with his patients through a special portal at www.mmrpatientview.com, thus creating a communications link between doctor and patient.

“MMR received validation of its Personal Health Record from leading hospital IT executives and the consulting community, citing MMR’s Personal Health Record as ‘the best full-featured PHR at the show,’” said Gene Barduson, MMR Healthcare Market Strategist. “Based on the reaction at the show we believe that MMR’s PHR could be offered to as many as three million patients by the end of 2010 through EMR system suppliers.”

“We are proud of our integrated medical record storage and Personal Health Record system that helps doctors deal with the ever-increasing flow of paper records in their practice while affording them a seamless way to provide the information to patients who can then play a more active role in their own care,” said Robert H. Lorsch, Chairman and CEO of MMR Information Systems, Inc. “With all of the attention on Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), it is important to remember that the vast majority of doctors still run their practices with paper records. MMR Pro is designed for doctors who want a cost-effective solution to digitize those paper records on a patient forward basis.”

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Have you ever picked up a cough, and a week or so into it wished that you could just call your doctor and ask a few questions about it? Wouldn’t it be so much easier to email your orthopedic surgeon, and just ask, “hey doc, I rolled my ankle a week ago, and it’s still swollen. Should I come in and have it looked at?”

This would be followed by the equally easy response of either “Hello there, no need to come in, just keep icing and resting for at least another 2 weeks,” or “you should probably get an x-ray if it has been that long.” Is this where medicine should be heading? Or is this a formula for erasing personalized medicine, the other futuristic goal? Can medicine head towards being both cost effective and efficient while maintaining a personalized touch, or are the two mutually exclusive?

In a recent article in Health Affairs, modernization of health practices is manifested in a merging of primary care with social media.  Social networking sites similar to Facebook are being utilized by physicians and their private practices to create a type of all-access forum.

On this website, patients can speak to the physicians directly through instant messaging, email the physician, and even chat and network with other patients who have similar problems. One such practice operates what they have named Hello Health, a website that has become an example of the transforming practice of primary care.

At Hello Health, patients can make an appointment either in person or online. Wait a minute…online? Is this truly the scenario outlined above? In a sense, it is, and the most important part for most people, payment, is quite simple: there is a basic enrollment fee to join the “office/practice” and for every online “visit” with a physician there is a fee of $50 to $100. Luckily for the patient, sending the physician an email does not constitute a visit. What’s the catch? No health insurance is taken.

So where does this leave us? You can sign into a medical practice like Facebook, “friend” your doctor and essentially pay per minute of health care advice received online. This poses many disadvantages, of course, such as the fact that the physician can do only so much without a physical exam, and the chances are that an in-office visit will result, bringing you back to square one minus a few hundred dollars. Then there is the ethical side of things.

Are we comfortable talking about personal information to a physician-as-screen-name? Has the technology reached the point of optimal security for this information to be shared online? It seems like there is a hint of a good idea in there somewhere, as social networking dominates the daily life of nearly every waking person today, but I would venture to say that it is still too risky technologically and much more so for the integrity of personalized medicine.