CMIO magazine just published an extensive article on the use of PHRs and patient portals. Yours truly had the pleasure of being interviewed for the article (while I was still with Children’s Hospital Boston) and they ended up using quite a bit of our conversation in the final piece – so much so that I had to make sure they actually credited the people who actually rolled out CHB’s PHR!

At Beacon 16 we’re still very focused on portals for both patients and providers. Beyond formative work on the Indivo Personally Controlled Health Record and the Dossia PHR platform, we’ve also built portals for providers, allowing community physicians easy and intuitive access to the parts of hospital records that are most important to the referring physicians in the community.

These days, we’re doing more mobile design at Beacon 16, and our usual suite of design shapes, stencils, and templates weren’t cutting it.

Despite regular aspersions cast from the rest of the design community, I still like to use Visio for my early wireframes and mockups — Visio is fast, interactively accurate, and accessible to the non-designers with whom I collaborate. (Visio 2010 is especially slick.)

Absent a great Visio iPhone stencil to download, I’ve decided to create one.

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If I said that my research objective was “to assess the patient-centeredness of personal health records,” who would you recommend that I interview?

I was flipping through a recent issue of JAMIA and noticed this article, “Improving personal health records for patient-centered care.” Some informatics folks at a nearby hospital took on the above objective, but used a curious strategy — they interviewed seven senior executives, three from hospitals, two from insurers, one from a commercial vendor, and one from a government agency.

For us, that would make a good project kickoff — get the perspectives of key decisions-makers first. Then, we’d go straight to the only people qualified to say whether a piece of software works for patients: patients themselves.