1997 Partnerships for Networked Consumer Health Information Conference

Summaries of Plenary Sessions and Breakout Sessions

Customizing Information #2: Patient Records for Patients

Tuesday, April 15
3:45 - 5:15 PM

Moderator: Margret Amatayakul, Executive Director, Computer-based Patient Record Institute, Chicago, IL

Speaker: David Forslund, PhD, Deputy Director, ACL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, "Patient Access to Distributed Medical Records"

Speaker: Ross D. Fletcher, MD, Chief of Cardiology, Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Washington, DC, "The National VA Pacemaker Project: Collecting Data From Patients at Home"

Speaker: Peter Szolovits, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Guardian Angel: Personal Lifelong Active Health Information Systems"

Statement of the Subject

Patient Records for Patients is about exciting new developments in making patients more a part of the process of their health care as managers of their health information.

The computer-based patient record is electronically maintained information about an individual's lifetime health status and health care. Computer-based patient record systems integrate information from multiple, remote sources to provide direct support for the provision of health care. The concept includes engaging the patient as an active participant in the health care process. Technology permits all authorized users of the computer-based patient record access for legitimate uses, while protecting the confidentiality of private health information in a secure environment.

Key Issues

Margret Amatayakul, Executive Director, Computer-based Patient Record Institute, is moderator of the session and will outline the vision of the computer-based patient record as an introduction.

David Forslund, PhD, Deputy Director, Advanced Computing Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, will outline key issues of security, confidentiality, data integrity, comprehensibility, and accessibility of patient information -- from technological roles and personal perspectives of patient as manager, health care provider as producer and validator, and potential conflict of interest for health care payors.

Ross D. Fletcher, MD, Chief of Cardiology at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, DC, will provide a specific example of the use of technology and its patient-centric focus in the National VA Pacemaker Project. He will describe how data are collected directly from patients at home.

Peter Szolovits, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will describe a "guardian angels" computational process which empowers the patient through direct interaction with the computer-based patient record for health care, health education, and health monitoring.

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