Definitions

 

Defined by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), in Division A of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009

 

Health Information Technology (HIT): electronic record of individually identifiable health information on an individual that can be drawn from multiple sources and that is managed, shared, and controlled by or primarily for the individual.

 

Electronic health record (EHR): an electronic record of health-related information on an individual that is created, gathered, managed, and consulted by authorized health care clinicians and staff.

 

Personal Health Record (PHR): Information on an individual that conforms to nationally recognized interoperability standards and that can be drawn from multiple sources. It is controlled by the patient.

 

Health Information Exchange (HIE): Electronic movement of health information among organizations according to nationally recognized standards.

 

 

Defined by the Health Record Banking Alliance

 

Health Record Bank is a trusted third party that securely collects and stores medical information on behalf of consumers, and enables each patient to fully control all access to their own data. HRBs are efficient, cost-effective, and protect individual privacy, and therefore represent a viable mechanism for delivering more complete information for each patient at any point of care. They also ensures stakeholder cooperation since the patients, rather than some new third party entity, are requesting their records from the various healthcare stakeholders.

 

There are three critical distinguishing features of a health record bank that make it the model/framework of choice in promoting the storage and use of electronic health information:

 

  • Patients control all access to the data.
    The patient controls who has access, when they have access and what they can do with it.

  • The record is patient-centric – not provider or payer-centric.
    The record contains data from multiple sources and providers, as opposed to only containing records for a single provider, care location or payer. Audit and tagging indicate source of the data and contribute to a “trusted source” status and promote clinical credibility by providers.

  • The record is persistent and portable.
    The patient’s record will be persistent and will not “age off” as is typical of most clinical systems in use today. The record will persist through changes in provider or payer, and can be moved from one health record bank to another at the patient’s request, without loss of data.