Why are you building yet another PHR system?

[MyPHRMachines]

What are the limitations of the available systems?  Do we really need yet another PHR system?

[Pieter Van Gorp]

First of all, we are not competing against commercially available PHR systems such as those surveyed by Medicare. 

That said, today's PHR systems have significant limitations with regards to:

1. the costs (effort) that they impose on providers that wish to make available their EMR data to PHR systems,
2. the costs (effort) that they impose on plugin (``app") developers that wish to build innovative software services on the PHR systems,
3. the trust (privacy) model, especially in the context of crowd-sourcing PHR app development.

In its current prototypical deployment, MyPHRMachines is a standalone web application.  However, it can be deployed as an extension (plugin) to other PHR systems too.  Doing this would have the following unique advantages:

1. Health providers can push their data to the MyPHRMachines plugin in binary form (with some metadata), instead of having to -interoperate semantically with detailed APIs such as that of Indivo/SMART/OpenHealthTools/DIRECT/... These semantic integrations are important but can be realized later, once the raw data at least is in the PHR already.
2. App developers can use whatever OS and API they like, depending on their specific expertise and the specific file formats that turn out to be popular on a specific healthcare market.
3. PHR system users can be confident that app developers do not get access to their PHR data.
4. Once data has been consolidated by MyPHRMachines apps, users can make it available to the host PHR system (e.g., HealthVault), in order to benefit from the special services provided at that level.

Finally, note that the adoption levels for today's PHR systems is still quite low.  Also, regardless many announcements, HealthVault is still not yet available in Europe.  In the meanwhile, EMR technology in Europe (and other parts of the world) is so diverse and integration is so poor that patients are suffering from many inefficiencies that could be solved by PHR technologies.