Meeting the Requirements of Project HealthDesign: Comparative Analysis with Respect to Existing and Emerging Clinical Data Standards and Commercial PHR Data Repositories

Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), in collaboration with the California HealthCare Foundation, Project HealthDesign is a $5 million national program of PHR systems. Administered by a national program office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Project HealthDesign's goal is to design and test a variety of PHR tools and applications that work together to help people achieve their various and specific health goals in an integrated fashion. The program is supported by the Foundation's Pioneer Portfolio, which funds innovative projects that can lead to breakthrough improvements in the future of health and health care. Reaching this goal requires innovation in two key arenas – the applications themselves and the infrastructure needed to support the applications, including data standards and repositories. Fundamental to that innovation, we believe, is a design philosophy that separates applications from the infrastructure that supports them. Thus, the nine interdisciplinary grantee teams supported by Project HealthDesign created a wide variety of personal health records applications, tools that help people monitor their health status and make everyday health decisions. To support these applications, we derived a set of requirements and analyzed the ability of available resources (PHR platforms, health data standards, data structures) to meet those requirements. The requirements and their functional specifications can be found at We now present another in a series of documents designed to inform the PHR community about innovation in PHRs – the results of a gap analysis conducted to determine the ability of existing clinical data standards and commercial PHR repositories to meet the requirements identified by the developers of the Project HealthDesign-funded applications. Although existing data standards and PHR repositories meet many of the requirements of these applications, the analysis highlights specific features identified by Project HealthDesign that are not yet fully supported by these existing resources. We invite the community of PHR developers and users, and health information technology vendors and researchers, to examine our findings. Through dialogue and discussion of this analysis, we hope to stimulate additional innovation in both personal health records and the infrastructure components needed to create a vibrant suite of information technology applications that support individuals as they seek to manage their health and health care more actively. comments will provide Project HealthDesign with valuable insight as we consider future program directions.