Personal health records help insurers retain members

Email
Tools

When insurers offer personal health records (PHR) as part of a health plan, they are more likely to retain their members. A three-year year study of nearly 400,000 Kaiser Permanente Northwest members, published online in the July American Journal of Managed Care, found that members who used Kaiser's personal health records were 2.6 times more likely to stay with Kaiser. PHR use was the third strongest predictor of retention, following membership tenure and illness burden and was especially noticeable among newer plan members,  FierceHealthIT reported.

What's more, a separate study by Virginia Commonwealth University, which was published in the July/August Annals of Family Medicine, found that patients using an interactive preventive health record, also known as a "higher-functioning" PHR, were twice as likely to keep up with preventive cancer screenings and other tests. --Read the full article on FierceHealthIT