Patient-controlled personal health record system can help making health care safer, cheaper, and more convenient by facilitating patients to 1) grant any care provider to access their complete personal health records anytime from anywhere, 2) avoid repeated tests and 3) control their privacy transparently. In this paper, we present the architecture of our devised Privacy-aware Patient-controlle...

BACKGROUND To our knowledge, no evidence is available on health care professionals' use of electronic personal health records (ePHRs) for their health management. We therefore focused on nurses' personal use of ePHRs using a modified technology acceptance model. OBJECTIVES To examine (1) the psychometric properties of the ePHR acceptance model, (2) the associations of perceived usefulness, ea...

Information technology (IT), especially in the form of an electronic health record (EHR), is touted by many as a key component of meaningful improvement in health care delivery and outcomes. A personal health record (PHR) may be an element of an EHR or a stand-alone record. Proponents of PHRs see them as tools that will improve consumers' ability to manage their care and will also enlist consum...

In this month’s edition of Pediatrics, Lion et al1 share with us their research on improving inpatient care through the adoption of a wide array of “clinical standard work” products. Overall, this research has led to system-wide decreased lengths of stay as well as decreased costs per hospitalization. At the same time, readmission rates have not increased, and the investigators show that patien...

ISSUE All too often, quality assurance looks at just one small part of the complex system that is health care. However, evidently each individual patient has one set of experiences and outcomes, often involving a range of health professionals in a number of settings across multiple sectors. ADDRESSING THE ISSUE In order to solve the problems of this complexity, we need to establish high-quali...

Rather than turn a practice upside-down with a "big bang" implementation or replace old workflows with entirely new ones, executives must survey and understand those clinical areas where the needs are real and the value of an electronic medical record to clinicians is immediate and obvious. For these and other reasons, obstetrics may be the best place to test an electronic medical record.