Dear Neil,
Thank you for bringing these questions up to the HealthFrame User Community Forum. Most of our customers do not directly and personally keep up with industry developments in the use of Personal Health Record (PHR) and may not be aware of the efforts that Records For Living expands in making sure HealthFrame continues to be a leading interoperable solution for personal health record management. Your questions give us an opportunity to highlight the dilligence of our efforts, though the simplicity of our solution may belie the complexity and thoroughness of the work that is accomplished "behind the scenes", as it were...
1) In answer to your first question, as to whether we would "incorporate these specs into current and future versions", we would direct your attention to the "Functional Model" that is well documented in HL7's proposal. You will find that it is an almost perfect functional documentation of what HealthFrame users already can do today with HealthFrame.
If you haven't already and if you are interested in our capabilities, we would encourage you to
download a free, fully functional evaluation copy of HealthFrame and see it for yourself.
One area that merits further comment is the area of Standards Specification support. HL7 has been collaborating with the ASTM international to produce an HL7-CDA based implementation of patient clinical record exchange, leveraging the ASTM CCR (Continuity of Care Record). Much progress has been made harmonizing the two efforts into the CCD (Continuity of Care Document) specification. As with most standardization efforts, it takes time to actually create a community of active business models that utilize technical specifications. This is the case with CCD. Records For Living is committed to supporting the HL7 CCD standard, especially as real life implementations of electronic clinical record exchange workflows that include patients and providers become a reality.
2) Records For Living cannot speak to the business models and intentions of other vendors.
Historically, however, there has been a tendency in the PHR market, for vendors to limit the transportability of a patient's record. The motivations are numerous and certainly include curbing an individual's ability to switch to a different solution that better fits that individuals needs, because quality of implementation, affordability, privacy or other considerations.
Records For Living believes in the quality of its overall solution, including technical, privacy, security, affordability, support and commitment to individual personal choice. We give our customers complete control over the management of their medical records, including the ability to interoperate with and even switch to other systems. We support CCR and other methods of exchanging clinical records, in a secure, patient-controlled way, because we believe that is the best way to support our customers and their interests.
Thank you again for your posting and we hope you will visit our forum again!
Support Team
Records For Living