Patient health information management: searching for the right model

Accurate and timely health information is a crucial element in the medical decision making process during a medical encounter. Inadequate or misleading patient health information can lead to medical errors, inaccurate decision making, and increased cost. Providing physicians with access to every detail of a patient's medical history is difficult. Striking the balance between adequate and effective amounts of information is difficult. The Personal Health Record and Continuity of Care Record have emerged as concepts to support that balance. This paper reviews recently published literature on (1) approaches to personal health information management, (2) distinctions between terms and definitions describing patient health information, its format, its availability, and its accessibility, (3) guidelines, studies, or standards to support the rationale of patient information data elements that should be available to the provider for any medical encounter, and (4) identification of the most important needs for patient health information that should be addressed. The purpose of the review is to clarify the benefits and detriments of the different approaches as well as to provide some recommendations for the right model of patient health information management, focusing on the idea of the appropriate health information being available when needed.