Day 1 - Question 1 of #20HIT Project by HL7Standards.com

Today is the kick-off of 20 Questions for Health IT project promoted by Chad Johnson of HL7Standards.com. This is an interesting project; sort of like an slow-motion, extended tweetchat. You can track it on Twitter using the #20HIT hashtag.

Question #1:

In what ways will personal health information exchange change patient engagement through individual ownership of the health record?

In order to answer this question of what “individual ownership of a health record” means, I think I’d have to have answers to and understand what “ownership” means. For instance…

1. What measures, events and “things” should I include in my personal health record? i.e. beyond the usual items on a History & Physical (H & P).

2. Which items in my health record require that I maintain a history of their values? Ex. Do I have to save everything with a date?

3. What are the baseline technical skills I should possess to manage my record? eg. Understanding of basic file formats (CSV, Fixed Length, XML?), How to import/export data? Etc.

4. How would I know which items I should pay extra attention to? Or should I not be doing any review/monitoring/interpretation at all and leave that to physicians?

5. What means of annotation, tagging and commentary are reasonable and are there any standards I could use to promote clarity and consistency?

I’m sure there are other questions to help define “ownership.” What do you think? Leave your responses at the HL7Standards blog or here.