Just a note on two reported items appearing on my desk this morning that may have a significant positive impact on empowering health care consumers in the coming months.

The first item is on a court case reported in today’s Los Angeles Times by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. It seems a Washington D.C. federal judge ruled in favor of a consumer group that sued the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)to allow disclosure of specific data about doctors from the Medicare Claims database. The non-profit Consumers Checkbook filed the suit to allow access to the database so that consumers will be able to find out how many times their physician has performed a procedure that they may be facing. Federal rules now protect the privacy of this physician information. The Department of Human Services has not decided whether to appeal but any such action would be somewhat in contrast to the Administration’s current transparency and value-based initiatives. I did take the opportunity to pose the question to DHHS Secretary, Mike Leavitt on his new blog. We’ll see what he says, if anything.

The other item of note is that on Monday, Health Level Seven (HL7), a standards developing organization (SDO) released for public comment a draft of a new proposed “Personal Health Record Systems Functional Model (PHR-S FM)”. Adopting a PHR standard is considered essential to outline system guidelines and facilitate the exchange of health information among different PHR systems as well as between PHR and EHR systems. The proposed HL7 PHR System Functional Model identifies functional requirements, not data requirements at this point, for PHR systems.

For health policy stakeholders interested in PHRs this may be a good opportunity to weigh in.