Forrester on PHRs

In mid-November, Forrester put out a report titled “PHRs: From Evolution to Revolution” by Liz Boehm, their healthcare lead. It’s not my lead area so I didn’t spend the money to buy the report, but here is the executive summary.

Health plans, driven by employer demand and expectations of improved member satisfaction and reduced medical costs, are investing in payer-based personal health records. But consumers have not raced to adopt them. Health plan customer experience professionals are on the hook to not only drive adoption but also engineer low-cost, interactive health support programs that will help members make better choices and save costs. To maximize their chance of success, health plan customer experience professionals need to focus on four critical areas: data management, behavior change, interface best practices, and patient and provider recruitment. This focus will help drive near-term success and position plans to weather the coming changes in the personal health record (PHR) market.

What I found interesting was the list of companies that they interviewed (and who they didn’t talk to).

• ActiveHealth (I have talked about them several times and think they have a strong offering.)
• Better Health Technologies
• CapMed (new to me, but they appear to have been in the space for a long time and are working with Microsoft on their product)
• HealthMedia
• Healthways (clearly a leader in the disease management space)
• iMetrikus
• Infosys (why them versus Accenture, IBM, McKinsey, etc.)
• Jeremy Nobel
• Matthew Holt Consulting (you can see his blog at The Health Care Blog)
• McKesson Health Solutions (they are everywhere)
• Medem (formed by the AMA and other groups…hadn’t heard much about them since they formed)
• Microsoft (why them versus Google)
• Protocol Driven Healthcare (I have never heard of these guys, but it appears that they work with some big clients in the population health arena.)
• WebMD (why them versus Revolution)