Portable records might have a place in medical tourism

To date, only large, academic health organizations like the Cleveland Clinic and Partners HealthCare System, and closed networks like Kaiser Permanente and the Veterans Health Administration, have had any luck getting patients and even doctors to embrace personal health records. So, exactly where else might you look to find Americans willing to create and keep portable PHRs? Try Singapore, Thailand, India and other hot spots of medical tourism.

A story in Medical Tourism Magazine looks at how the global healthcare market can provide the framework for secure, interoperable, consumer-directed PHRs with strict privacy controls. It's not the most objective story in the world--the author is an investor in a start-up PHR company--but it lays out an interesting argument for data portability taken to its logical conclusion.

For more on how medical tourists could drive PHR demand:
- see the Medical Tourism Magazine piece