About

Introduction

Welcome to Personal Health Records at nursing2go. This site is dedicated to information regarding personal health records (PHR). If you’re not familiar with PHRs, there are some good introductions on the web. Wikipedia and myPHR are a couple. This site is my effort to understand the issues surrounding PHRs. My main focus is to try to learn what kinds of systems are available and make it easy to find them.

Audience

My primary audience is myself. I’ve found keeping information I’ve gathered in a central and easily accessible location helps me to organize my thoughts on a subject. While researching for a paper for school on PHRs I found myself wondering what kinds of systems are actually available. I found a few sites that listed some systems, but none were comprehensive. Secondarily, I think that the information here may be beneficial to consumers and healthcare practitioners. The section on PHR systems will hopefully become an easy place to find a system suited to your needs. The sections on policy, standards, organizations, and publications hopefully may aid healthcare practitioners interested in the development of PHR systems. Part of my interest in PHR systems is in the possibility that they may help improve healthcare systems in general. To that end my hope in making the information I find easily accessible to others is that the process of making PHR systems easy to use and effective may be facilitated.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the open source software community. The generosity of countless individuals in making their knowledge and skills freely available to the community has allowed me to learn how to put a site like this together. I would particularly like to mention Open Source CMS. This site is patterned off their concept of pulling together the available options and allowing people to share their opinions. It is also the place where I was able to find the system I used to put this site and my main blog (nursing2go) together.

I would also like to acknowledge the profession of nursing. The generosity of many individuals in sharing their knowledge and wisdom led to me becoming a nurse. The drive to improve healthcare and society in general has been part of my nursing education. I hope you find something useful here. I’m always appreciative of comments and suggestions. If you know of resources that may be helpful to others, leave me a message and I’ll try to work them in. Feel free to rate the resources listed and leave comments throughout the site at will.

Regards,

Chris Macintosh, RN, BSN