Aetna to link physicians to patients

HARTFORD, CT – Aetna is working with NaviMedix to provide physicians access to members’ personal health records at the point of care.

“Electronic delivery of PHR summaries provides a more complete clinical profile of a patient when physicians need it,” said Aetna spokeswoman Tammy Arnold. “Having this information at physicians’ fingertips could help reduce medical errors and improve patient safety.”

Aetna’s PHR, which is driven by ActiveHealth Management’s CareEngine system, contains up to 24 months of health information generated by claims data and members.

So far, more than 4 million members have access to Aetna’s PHR and can grant permission to share their PHR summaries with providers who have signed up to use NaviMedix’s NaviNet multi-payer platform.

“We are still in this transition stage, but, as of April 2008, more than 320,000, or 39 percent of Aetna participating providers were deployed with NaviNet and can access PHRs if given permission by their patients,” said Arnold.

Tom Morrison, executive vice president at NaviMedix, said the ultimate goal is an interconnected electronic health record for every patient. With the current barriers ensuring a long time horizon for achieving this goal, he said this solution delivers a seamless, practical approach that gets health information in front of the physician at the point of care.

Aetna and NaviNet are conducting assessments and evaluating ways to measure the impact of PHR access, said Arnold.

The analytics-driven PHR, which includes multi-source data, provides meaningful information for providers and is the makings of an information exchange solution, said Michael Hodgkins, MD, chief medical officer of NaviMedix. “The most important part of this PHR is its decision-support capability,” he said.

Later this year, physicians will also be able to receive electronic Care Alerts about their patients. “This is what physicians want out of PHRs,” Hodgkins said.

Linking Aetna’s PHR with the NaviNet platform “creates an active reason to use personal health records as a tool and not a static e-file folder,” said Lynne Dunbrack, program manager for Health Industry Insights, an IDC company. “This is a much more powerful implementation of a PHR,” she said.

While this implementation is an emerging practice, Dunbrack said other payers may roll out their PHRs to physicians via NaviMedix’s multi-payer platform.