ARLINGTON, Va. –When William Yasnoff, MD, PhD, convened a stakeholders meeting in earlier this month, he was hoping to found a Health Record Banking Association.

Instead, attendees, comprising community and consumer groups and healthcare IT vendors, wanted to bring more stakeholders to the table to develop a larger group.

The Health Record Banking Coalition was formed “to assist stakeholders in the promotion of community repositories of health records to improve the safety and efficiency of patient care.”

Yasnoff, managing partner of NHII Advisors and former senior advisor for the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Health Information Infrastructure, said he wants to bring to the national level the concept of having each consumer’s electronic medical information in one place to ensure immediate access by healthcare providers.

Eschewing a huge central repository, the coalition would promote multiple “health record banks” with consumer choice and complete control over access.

“There have been many voices promoting the concept of the ‘fetch and show’ model for electronic records,” Yasnoff said. “While this is an attractive concept in theory, it is not financially or operationally workable in practice.”

Neil Cowles, CEO of Tolven, emphasized the importance of having this kind of dialogue on the national level and the local and regional levels, where data repositories are being deployed. The open-source vendor provides electronic personal health records, electronic clinical health records and healthcare informatics platform.

“We have to ensure that we have mechanisms in place to protect consumer privacy. This concept addresses the need to appropriately and securely bring data from disparate sources into one place,” he said.

Janet Marchibroda, CEO of eHealth Initiative, also applauds Yasnoff’s efforts to engage consumers and focus on a patient-centered model.

She expressed concern regarding the complexities in building bank records at the community level, but felt that the coalition would be able to “sort through barriers and explore opportunities.”

“There is more exploration that needs to be done to determine if this is the right model,” she said.

With many local and regional groups grappling with sustainability, Marchibroda said the coalition would have the ability to test in the marketplace its model of healthcare IT vendors underwriting and consumers paying for health banking records.

Despite her concerns, Marchibroda said, “I applaud his tenacity and leadership.”