Insurer offers mobile health records

Computerworld - Today, you can use your cell phone to make voice calls, send e-mail, browse the Web, make video recordings and even conduct wireless bank transactions.

But would you use your cell phone to carry your health records?

Blue Cross of Northeast Pennsylvania is betting that its customers will want to keep complex personal health records on their phones, especially when they have several doctors and medications to keep track of.

The health insurer began a slow rollout last month of a secure mobile personal health record application that is designed to give customers access to their medical information no matter where they go, said Drew Palin, chief development officer at the Blue Cross affiliate in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He said the application may be among the first of its kind.

The application is free to members and has so far rolled out to less than 10% of the 600,000 people enrolled at the insurer.

Palin said the mobile health record application is free because the company wants to promote its use. Nationwide adoption of electronic medical record technology by hospitals and doctors has been "slow," Palin said, adding, "We figured the other way to promote electronic records is through the patients."

So far, it seems that the service is being adopted by the typical group of technology early adopters who are open to new systems and applications and have come to terms with questions about the privacy of their medical records, he said. But Palin noted that from Day One, his managers and others were primarily concerned with keeping the records secure and private. "Our No. 1 through 10 priorities were security and privacy," he said.

Blue Cross of Northeast Pennsylvania sought out AllOne Health Group Inc., a health care technology integrator in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., that has partnered with Diversinet Corp., a Toronto-based company with 10 years of mobile security expertise, Palin said. Diversinet had already offered a similar application for mobile financial services.

The AllOne Mobile application runs on almost all varieties of smart phones and the majority of cell phones on the market. It stores the data in encrypted form behind a password, said Stuart Segal, vice president of integrated operations at AllOne.

Palin said he felt confident in the security protocols because of the encryption it offers. Encryption works on the actual phone, over the air, and on the Diversinet server used to gather the patient data that is input by the patient from a desktop computer, he said. During the desktop-input process, dual-factor authentication is used to authenticate the phone as the device the user wants to deploy; the insurer and other parties can never see the health data, Palin explained.