Health Level Seven, Inc. (HL7), America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) on Dec. 4 announced they have signed a memorandum of understanding to create a collaborative process for the maintenance of portability standards for personal health records (PHR).
The memorandum expands the number of stakeholders involved in the standards development process to help facilitate data portability between health insurance plans to give plan members the ability to move their personal health data when their health coverage changes.
HL7 formed a PHR working group in early 2005 to develop a set of functions present in a PHR system and guidelines that facilitate health information exchange among different PHR systems and between PHR and EHR systems. In early 2008, HL7 intends to publish a PHR-S functional model draft standard for trial use version to allow the industry to work with a stable standard for up to two years while it is being refined into an ANSI-accredited version. Read the press release.
