California is launching three demonstration projects to put personal health records in the hands of patients.

California’s Office of Health Information Integrity yesterday announced contracts for three pilot projects to explore the use of different types of personal health records. 

According to Pamela Lane, director of CalOHII, there is no pilot of this kind currently running in California, and she hopes it will be a boon to health information exchanges and providers, to see how personal health records can work best.

“Nothing currently exists to aid … in evaluating the suitability of PHRs for inclusion in their delivery of care,” Lane said.

The three pilot projects:

• In San Diego, electronic medical records will be sent directly to an iBlueButton mobile application. A contract yesterday was awarded to Humetrix, based in Del Mar, 20 miles north of San Diego. Humetrix will work with the regional health information exchange in San Diego, which includes Kaiser, VA San Diego Health System and the UC-San Diego Health System.
• Also in San Diego, UC-San Diego Department of Emergency Medicine will oversee a bidirectional transport of patient data between end-users of community health information service providers and patient-owned PHRs.
• In Santa Cruz, patients will have a patient-controlled aggregated PHR record, which will be maintained in No More Clipboard. That means patients will be able to view their personal health record from all of their providers and facilities, as well as viewing most of the patient’s data from the health information exchange.

The demonstration projects are funded with federal stimulus money, through the HITECH Act, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.