^*Stephen T. Parente is the Director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute and an Associate Professor in the Finance Department at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota where he specializes in health economics, information technology, and health insurance. Dr. Parente has been the principal investigator for a series of evaluations on consumer directed health plans since 2002. He was a health policy advisor for the McCain 2008 Presidential Campaign and served as Legislative Fellow in the office of Senator John D. Rockefeller IV during the 1990s health reform initiatives. He has a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University.

Abstract

Calls to action for widespread adoption of electronic health records have come from a broad spectrum of the private and public sectors. The problem, to date, is not that information does not exist, as much as that the data have not been organized around the patient. An integrated Personal Health Record is a patient- or family-centered technology designed to capture not only the contacts with health care providers, but also personal information on insurance, diet, and personal preferences that a physician's health record will not capture. Medical banking, based on a new technology platform called the Integrated Health Card, is emerging as a solution to the problem of collecting and combining information from the electronic health record with personal health information. It may also be the only way for fledging health savings accounts to enable the price and quality transparency of the medical market that has been called for repeatedly in this decade. In analyzing the political and patient applications of widespread adoption of this new innovation, the positive contributions to social welfare are very likely to outweigh the negative.