Personal Health Records (PHR) and the future of the physician-patient relationship

We provide early evidence that healthcare consumers plan to play a more active role in their healthcare through the use of a patient-centric information tool-the Personal Health Record (PHR). We assess consumer attitudes, values, and beliefs of PHRs through the use of a focus group and further analyze the intention to adopt a PHR through the use of a survey based on the adoption of innovations model by Rogers [38]. We find that while barriers to PHR adoption exist-such as concerns about privacy, security and the lack of visible use of PHRs by others within immediate social groups-intention to use PHRs are high within our sample. This suggests that active consumer involvement in healthcare may be on the rise and, more importantly, that information may become a key mediator in the physician-patient relationship. While our findings are based on pilot studies consisting of relatively small sample sizes and subject to limited generalizability, these results do suggest that consumer empowerment has the potential to fundamentally alter traditional physician-patient paradigms.