Children's Hospital Boston and eClinicalWorks announced that they will aggregate data from patients who are seen at the Hospital's ambulatory programs and primary care practices at the Hospital's Pediatric Physicians' Organization and push it to the patients’ personal health records (PHRs).

I know a few of you aren't fans of eClinicalWorks, but I want to focus on the bigger picture of what the company and Children's Hospital Boston are doing. The knock on PHRs has been that they don't interact with physicians and therefore are standalone, siloed information. The industry is responding, from vendors to health systems to payers. Vendors' applications are now aggregating data and pushing it to the various electronic records and sharing that data among patient and physician, and doing it in a way that doesn't cause workflow disruption. Health systems are understanding the value of data aggregation in terms of better clinical decision making and are becoming willing collaborators with vendors. They're also developing stronger relationships with their physician groups and their patients.

The market has responded very quickly. Of course, the ultimate goal is portability. Right now data aggregation and sharing is happening with patients within health systems, so it's only impacting patients who go to their facilities and affiliated physicians. The same can be said for payer-based PHRs. Once the member leaves the health plan, so goes away the PHR.

Microsoft and Google's PHR offerings are moving in the direction of portability, although there is a huge roadblock in the form of privacy issues and HIPAA. Down the road, there will need to be an integration piece to bring all forms of electronic patient data together - from multiple physicians' and specialists' electronic health record (EHR) systems to the health system's electronic medical record system and PHRs to the payer's PHRs - without confusion, workflow disruption and duplication. No doubt the market is working on that now. And then we'll deal with the privacy roadblock.