Employers are proactively taking on spiraling healthcare costs. That's the theme of the personal health record (PHR) initiative announced in December by Intel Corp., Wal-Mart, Pitney Bowes, British Petroleum America Inc. and Applied Materials.
The five companies will be financing and rolling out portable, private, life-long personal health records to approximately 2.5 million employees, their families and retirees by mid-2007.
Intel Chairman Craig Barrett said runaway healthcare costs are negatively impacting companies' ability to compete globally.
Individuals will control their PHRs and have the ability to opt-in and decide what healthcare information they wish to share.
The records will be held by the independent, non-profit organization Omnimedix Institute of Portland, Ore., which is developing the health record technology, called Dossia.
Omnimedix designed its technology and policy principles on the Markle Foundation's Connecting for Health Common Framework, according to JD Kleinke, chairman and CEO.
Michael Critelli, chairman and CEO of Pitney Bowes, said the initiative allows the company to address the "runaway cost of healthcare" and to maintain its culture as a good employer.
Patricia Miller, senior vice president of human resources for British Petroleum America Inc., said that as a major purchaser of healthcare it is a "business imperative" to find an "innovative approach" for employees to manage their healthcare.
This major announcement is part of a trend by employers to help drive the adoption of PHRs.
Several Kansas City, Mo.-based companies went live in mid-December with their community health record-sharing capability under an employer-based regional health information organization (RHIO), called Healthe Mid-America. Sprint Nextel, J.E. Dunn and Cerner, which is donating the Web-based technology and storage for Healthe, are among the employers involved in the roll-out of the pilot program in the first quarter of 2007.
"Employers had been sitting on the sidelines and saw little progress," said CEO Jim Hansen. "They wanted to be more directly involved in dealing with what can be done about healthcare cost and quality."
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt applauded the Intel-led PHR initiative. In a December 6, 2006 letter to Barrett, he wrote, "I hope to see more employers making similar commitments soon."