NEW YORK –  ActiveHealth Management is providing portability options for members who have ActivePHR personal health records through their employer or health plan.

The ability to transfer their health information to a consumer PHR version is addressing some of the criticism of personal health records that don’t allow for data following the consumer or the sharing of data with relevant parties.

Lack of portability, effort required to manually update records if data isn’t pre-populated by payers or providers, privacy and security concerns and consumer lack of awareness of the PHR concept are major barriers to adoption, Lynne Dunbrack, program director at Health Industry Insights, said.

Many PHRs are simply data repositories, said Nita Stella, senior vice president of product development for ActiveHealth Management. Members can transfer their health information to a consumer version of ActivePHR or to Microsoft HealthVault. “We’re enabling technology to move data around,” she said of ActiveHealth Management’s efforts.

While it’s critical to update data, the data is not useful unless it has intelligence behind it, she said. “You have to have an intelligent engine that provides actual inference and supports evidence to enable healthcare decisions,” she said.

Consumer comfort with using PHRs is key to adoption and will increase demand for more functionality not unlike consumer adoption of online banking, she said.

“Alerts, such as reminders of overdue screening exams or the potential for an adverse drug event to occur, will encourage consumers to take action to manage their own health,” she said. “The PHR becomes an actionable tool, not simply a static collection of health information.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services recently launched PHR pilots for its Medicare members in Arizona and Utah. “With the pilots we have under way now, our focus has been on the consumer and empowering them to take control of the management of their health and healthcare,” said spokesman Donald McLeod.

“We are looking into working more with physicians in the future,” he added. “We hope that EHRs and PHRs will be interconnected someday, but we don’t really know when that will happen.”

Stella said ActiveHealth Management is trying to set the bar higher for PHRs. “The next-generation PHR is a more patient-oriented tool that can be accessed wherever the user is,” she said.