The bill, currently called "a discussion draft," was introduced by leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and its Subcommittee on Health and would amend the Public Health Service Act.

Quoted: The proposal would provide financial aid to small group practices, particularly those in rural or medically underserved areas, for acquiring healthcare IT. It would also require personal health record (PHR) vendors, such as Google and Microsoft, to notify customers if their PHRs have been breached and designate the Federal Trade Commission as an interim authority over security enforcement.

Quoted: Drugstore chains are among early partners that can provide patient histories.

Quoted: Steve Leiber, head of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, said physicians might repeat tests because they do not trust the data stored in personal health records. Leiber said PHRs work best as a complement to providers health records.

Quoted: The entry of corporate behemoths like Google and Microsoft into the health information industry could have fundamental impacts on patient privacy, as well as on clinical research, according to an April 17 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The article, entitled, “Tectonic Shifts in the Health Information Economy,” differentiated personally controlled health records (PCHRs) from basic personal health records because PCHRs place primary control of data use and disclosure in the hands of patients. The authors cited the need for collaboration among PCHR providers, academic medical centers and the government in order to reach a consensus about appropriate methods of preserving data security and conducting research. “Giving someone access to data that is institutionally controlled may have some benefits for the patient including insight into their own care, but with PCHRs, we go well beyond the walls of the institution,” explained Kenneth Mandl, associate professor at Children’s Hospital Boston, and co-author of the article. “Patients can engage with other institutions and entities, while the data flows into a repository that is exclusively controlled by the patient.” One major concern with this dramatic increase in data liquidity, said Mandl, is that corporate entities entering the personal health record field are not held to the same standards as an academic research institution. Because companies like Google currently say they do not have to comply with the requirements and safeguards of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), there is no indication if they will adhere to research standards, he said. “Under HIPAA, if one is to do research, they go before an institutional review board, which operates under the federal government and reviews protocols on how the data should be used,” Mandl said. “There are restrictions as far as aggregating patient data, benefits, risks, and notification.

Quoted: With the recent foray into the personal health record market by technology giants Google and Microsoft, privacy experts are warning consumers about the privacy risks associated with PHRs. Supporters of the technology maintain that the benefits outweigh the risks

Quoted: In lifting the veil on the worst-kept secret in health care, Google chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt has unleashed a fury of hope, punditry, and hype about the future of health-IT. Schmidt introduced the beta version of Google Health last Thursday during a keynote address to the annual Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) meeting, calling the product more than a personal health record. “It’s really a platform for interacting with health data,” Schmidt said. The description echoed the attitude of Microsoft regarding that company’s HealthVault, even though the health-IT community routinely lumps both products into the broad category of PHRs. “HealthVault is a consumer health platform,” Chris Sullivan, U.S. director of health care provider industry solutions for Microsoft, said at HIMSS. (See “Microsoft Debuts HealthVault.”) For now, as widely reported a week earlier, Google will test Google Health with 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic. Schmidt said Cleveland Clinic will output patient data from its Epic Systems MyChart Web portal. Once the information is in Google Health, patients will be able to annotate, enhance, and add to their records, as well as search the Web in the context of that information. “Google Health begins with search,” Schmidt said.

The technology giants Google and Microsoft are entering the growing market of electronic medical record-keeping just as the government is accelerating its own efforts to apply information technology to healthcare.

Quoted: Uniform standards for sharing medical information still need to be established because healthcare providers are responsible for maintaining complete “medical legal records” for their patients, Barr said. “They’re working on one end of it and not the other,” he said of Google, Microsoft and the other technology companies.

Quoted: Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Google Health will store patients health records online and allow users to import records from different health provider systems. He noted that Google will not use advertising to support the service and will not share any data with outside entities without the patients consent.