Ok, back to Health IT and PHRs. This is something I’d hoped to see:

CVS-Google Health pact now includes drugstores – BusinessWeek.

Medication lists are the most important part of a Personal Health Record. Over the last four years I’ve spent a lot of time talking with physicians about this, and it’s almost the only point of complete unanimity. “Give me the medication list,” they say, “and all else is forgiven.” A physician can infer quite a bit of very useful information from a the drugs a patient is taking.

I’m looking forward to trying this out. Unfortunately (for this very specific task) I’m not on any chronic medications. But I do fill all my prescriptions at CVS, since I’ve spent the last five years in Boston and Washington, both cities with extreme CVS penetration. So they have data on me – we’ll see how easy it is to get it out without having a new prescription filled.

The next step is for other pharmacy chains to follow suit (I think they’ll have to – WalMart and Walgreens, in particular). The CVS announcement demonstrates that the security and identity issues are manageable. This is a lot simpler than building a Health Information Exchange, where you have to identify patients at one or more degrees of remove. Determining that Patient A, visiting Hospital B, is the same Patient A that visited Hospital C three weeks ago is a hard problem, particular when Patient A isn’t involved in the determination. Figuring out how to release pharmacy data to Patient A is a lot simpler – because all that CVS really has to do is prove that they’re turning over the data to the Google Health account associated with the person who physically walked into the store and picked up the pills. All the necessary identity proofing is already in place, and if the patient used a fake name and paid cash – so what? It’s still not a HIPAA violation.

Widespread pharmacy adoption is going to blow PHR adoption wide open, and Google just took the high ground. I expect to see a similar announcement around integration with HealthVault shortly. CVS Caremark and Microsoft did a webinar together a few weeks ago, and Dr. Troy Brennan, CVS’ Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, was previously at Aetna where he was a major supporter of the ActiveHealth PHR platform. He gets it – and CVS certainly understands that a single PHR platform partner is not in their best interest. My prediction for the future is that we’ll see all of the major chains linked up with both Google Health and HealthVault within the next year.