Records For Living Community

While searching for PHR software last year I found that HealthFrame by Records for Living (RFL) was the one that met most of my requirements.  There were very few others that met my minimum requirements (e.g. support of industry standards, CCR and CCD import and export capability, a standalone application, linking of medical reports).  In addition, the application appeared to be well designed and quite flexible.

Over the last six months, support through the Forum has dropped.   Timely responses to help requests are lacking or never offered.  Responses to Bugs and Change Requests state that the issue will be looked into or considered for the next release but the lack of Forum activity by RFL has one wondering if these will ever be addressed.  Another issue is that The Forum is being inundated with apparent fake user accounts.

Please respond to this post so that your user community knows the future of HealthFrame.  Specifically addressing the following:

• Is RFL planning to stay in the health care software business?
  
• Will there be a future release of HealthFrame and when?
• If there are no future releases, are you planning to sell the product to another party so that future enhancements can be made and support can be provided?
• If there are no further plans:
• Would you consider releasing the source code into the public domain?
• Would you at a minimum consider provide a utility so the end users can at least maintain updates to the embedded Code Sets from data files freely available for downloading from their source?

HealthFrame is a fine product and it is hopped that RFL will continue with its support.

Respectfully,
Rob

We apologize that we have allowed support in the Community Forum to lag the last few months. The person who was responsible for that area has become busy on another project. We hope she will be able to return to the forum by the end of the year, but in the meantime, I will be following up on Community Forum posts.

As for your more specific questions about RFLs future - we are actively developing a major new HealthFrame release. I'm reluctant to offer specific timelines, because we've yet to finalize exactly what particular features will be staged in what particular release.

But I can say that we expect to have limited beta testing by the early Fall timeframe. The feedback we receive from that beta testing will help us decide which features need to be completed before HealthFrame v3 is released, and which can be postponed until HealthFrame v3.1.

As for the safety you should feel in using HealthFrame - please remember WHY you were interested in a PHR that supported industry standards like CCR and CCD! One of the main reasons is that it GUARANTEES the safety of your data in a way a promise from a vendor cannot. Any company - no matter how large or small (consider the recent demise of Lehman Brothers or semi-demise of AIG) can fail, and fail to meet their goals for the future.

Your investment in recording and tracking your data is protected by the fact that with HealthFrame - YOU control your own data (on your own machine) - and you can always save it in industry standard exchange formats. Any future PHRs - which might be better than HealthFrame - will overwhelmingly likely support these formats (Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault do).

We hope you will continue using HealthFrame. Please continue posting your questions and suggestions to the Community Forum. And please consider joining our beta program this fall, to help allay your fears, and help guide the schedule for what parts of HealthFrame we build next.

Records For Living Support Team.

I'm thrilled to hear this.  I too had been worried about the future of Healthframe.  I can understand that with so many free PHR's available to people it can make selling software difficult.  However, if people will use Healthframe they will see, like I did, that it really is a better solution than either Google or Microsoft.  The only advantage I see that Google has at the moment is that there is a "reader" available for the Iphone.  I carry a PDF of the CCR on my Iphone, but it is harder to read if I need to look something up at the doctor's office.    I'm looking forward to the new release and will GLADLY pay for the upgrade. 

I am also pleased to hear RFL is well and still kicking. My records on HFE go back to 1989. I was very active offering suggestions in the community forum after the release of version 2.0 with the intent of improving an already very good product. I believe many of those suggestions will be favorably considered and find their way into version 3.0. I would be pleased to participate in the 3.0 beta as well.

Since my wife past away in 2007 I have far less data to enter into HFE but I still continue to do so for myself. For others thinking about using HFE my strongest recommendation is stop thinking and start doing. My wife resolved years of doctor's inadequacies and found the link to her long term illnesses by listing test data and noting the changes over time. Your wellness and life are in your hands, not with any doctor.

Robert

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robert