Information gap: can health insurer personal health records meet patients' and physicians' needs?

Personal health records (PHRs), centralized places for people to electronically store and organize their health information, can benefit both patients and doctors. This qualitative study of health insurers' PHRs for enrollees reveals potential benefits and challenges. Insurers' ability to put claims-based data into the PHR offers an advantage.

Hospitalists and care transitions: the divorce of inpatient and outpatient care.

We interviewed hospitalist and nonhospitalist respondents as part of the Community Tracking Study site visits to examine how the growing use of hospitalists has affected care delivery systems. The growth of hospitalist programs contributes to a loss of physicians' participation on hospital medical staffs, which increases the burden of coordination and blurs accountability for the quality of postdischarge care. Arrangements where companies and multispecialty medical groups employ hospitalists are more likely than others to establish routines for ensuring coordinated transitions upon hospital admission and discharge.

Hospital-physician portals: the role of competition in driving clinical data exchange.

Recent policy efforts to encourage the use of health information technology are emphasizing development of communitywide health information exchanges to share clinical data across patient care settings. Interviews in twelve U.S.