History
Internet portal technology has been in common use since the 1990s. The financial industry has been particularly adept at using the Internet to grant individual users access to personal information. Possibly because of the strictness of HIPAA regulations, or the lack of financial incentives for the health care providers, the adoption of patient portals has lagged behind other market segments.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), in particular the HITECH Act within ARRA, sets aside approximately $19 billion for health information technology. This funding will potentially offset the costs of electronic medical record systems for practicing physicians. Because the conversion to electronic medical records is typically complex, systems often transition to patient portals first and then follow with a complete implementation of electronic medical records.
Concurrently, personal health record systems are becoming more common and available. At present, individual health data are located primarily on paper in physicians' files. Patient portals have been developed to give patients better access to their information. Given the patient mobility and the development of clear interoperable standards, the best documentation of patient medical history may involve data stored outside physician offices.
Read more about this topic: Patient Portal
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“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)