On Wednesday, I attended a very well-organized, dynamic conference on next-generation personal health records organized by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  At CSHAL, we have a particularly big interest in this topic.  We believe that college students will be among the early adopters and heaviest users of these innovative applications.  Why?  For two primary reasons: 

1.  This demographic’s comfort level with the Internet and social networking tools; and,

2.  The potential of these applications to improve long-term “wellness” by assessing exercise and activity levels, stress levels and moods, and diet.

The day was also valuable in terms of raising the profile of CSHAL with key healthcare organizations, and we had a lot of very productive side-bar conversations.  Over 250 people attended the conference.  The majority of people there were from universities working on PHR applications; health-related foundations; healthcare organizations and providers; and, technology companies.  The agenda can be found here.

Nine university teams provided demonstrations and reports on their efforts to design next-generation personal health record applications.  In addition, there were panels covering key policy and privacy issues associated with PHRs, and a discussion of the “open platform” technology approach taken by all of the teams.  Continue reading...

The university teams developed some very practical online applications, such as for managing a variety of medicines; new tools for dealing with diabetes and heart disease; and a handheld “pain diary” connected with the doctor. One of the more interesting applications “researched teens’ culture and experiences to determine how best to design tools – gadgets and Web spaces/places – to help them become aware of activities and events in their lives that impact their health and then assume responsibility for managing those factors.” Part of this project involved developing a self-assessment tool called a “mood meter.”

Carol Diamond, the managing director of the Markle Foundation’s health program, and executive director of “Connecting for Health” did a particularly good job of framing the privacy and security issues.  A series of charts laying out her presentation and work can be found here.

On the platform side, an interesting development was that there was some agreement that a number of applications should be considered “middleware” in that all PHR consumers would want those features integrated into their interface with other applications.  One example of a key piece of “middleware” is the calendar application.

Given the potential of next-generation personal health records to improve the health and wellness of college students, we see CSHAL playing a cutting edge role in encouraging their early testing and use on college campuses.   Stay tuned.