– Noah Bartolucci, Communications Director, Aspen Health Forum

Link for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly response: “What we have here is failure to communicate.” Incidentally, that line was used twice in “Cook Hand Luke.” The first was by the Warden who did not use the word “a”, and the last by Paul Newman, Luke, who said before he was gunned down at the window, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” No matter who makes the statement regarding digital data, it is true.

Bill,
There is no link in your comment, please provide.

PJ,
Actually there are several PHRs on the Net that are being used with the best example being that provided by Kaiser-Permanente or the VA’s HealtheVet.

Chilmark’s big issue with mymedmanager is that the founder was put onto a panel on “Big Idea” and Chimark would hardly call mymedmanager even close to the next “Big Idea”. It is dated, it is somewhat arcane.

Yes, mymedmanager may have a place as a transition to online tools, but even here Chilmark sees this as a very small window of opportunity. The value of the Internet for networking, sharing, leveraging expert systems, etc. provides such a huge value proposition over a paper-based notebook that such paper-based systems will be rapidly eclipsed and fall to the way-side.

MyMedManager has a place: after all, right now there *is* no PHR, to speak of. My mom and my Aunt would be a lot more comfortable with a nice booklet, in fact.

And I know when my daughters were little they’d have loved to get their hands on those pages of sticky letters at the back.

In a way, though, it kind of sums up one of the points you made on wellness orientation vz sickness orientation: *IF* I bought a MMMgr, or *if* I used a PHR, they would both be blank records – I tend to be one of those that takes care of themselves.

On the other hand, I know many others (and see around me many, many more) who would need, and have more than one volume.

Actually, could it be that something like MMMgr might be a bellwether, sales-wise and adoption-wise, for expected adoption of an electronic version?

By way of comparison: it wasn’t that long ago that although it seemed to me that *everybody* had high-speed internet, AOL was still giving away dial-up CDs at the local supermarkets. They wouldn’t have been doing that if the market – however slim in margin terms – was not there, I’m certain.

So the PHR wait might be a little extended.

Maybe there’s a niche waiting to form around handwriting recognition and the porting of MMMgr-type records into a PHR (in a generation or two)?

http://www.aspenhealthforum.org/video