Health Level Seven, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association Sign MOU to Collaborate on Portability Standards for Personal Health Records

This collaboration will help promote standards across the Insurance Company based PHRs and will benefit people who may need to migrate between plans. SV

ANN ARBOR, Mich., – December 4, 2007 -- Health Level Seven, Inc. (HL7), America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association (BCBSA), today announced they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to create a collaborative process for the maintenance of portability standards for personal health records (PHR).
This MOU expands the number of stakeholders involved in the standards development process to help facilitate data portability between health insurance plans to give plan members the ability to move their personal health data when their health coverage changes.
Charles Jaffe, MD, PhD, and CEO of HL7 said, “We applaud AHIP and BCBSA for investing in the early development efforts of the PHR data portability standards and for entrusting HL7 to maintain the standards. PHR’s will give consumers the power to integrate and manage their personal healthcare information and it provides a framework for standards-based interoperability between the consumer and the provider.”
Health insurance plan-based PHRs contain claims encounter and administrative data drawn from health insurance plan data sources as well as individuals’ self-entered information.

HL7