Firm tries again with personal health records

Even though Google Inc. has given up on the business of electronic personal health records, Fort Wayne-based NoMoreClipboard.com is launching a new service it thinks will crack open the market.

The company’s latest service, called cc:Me, gives patients a free and secure web-based account that can receive their electronic medical records from any other system and also can receive new records from any electronic medical record system their doctor or hospital happens to use.

“One of the barriers to widespread consumer adoption of portable personal health records has been the difficulty of populating a PHR with existing clinical data,” said NoMoreClipboard.com President Jeff Donnell. “cc:Me simplifies the exchange of health information in an industry-standard format that is interoperable with any certified electronic health record system used by physicians and hospitals, with no need for integration.”

For doctors—especially those struggling to meet the standard for “meaningful use” of electronic medical record set by the federal Medicare program in 2009—the service might be a shortcut to compliance.

For example, the Medicare rules require doctors to send their patients electronically—and securely, so regular e-mail accounts won’t do—a “Continuity of Care Document” to keep the patients engaged in their care.

Doctors who fail to meet this and other requirements will miss out on Medicare bonus payments the next two years. And after that, doctors not using electronic medical records will get their payments from Medicare clipped by a percentage point or two.

NoMoreClipboard.com is also pitching its new product to vendors of electronic medical record systems, saying cc:me can engage patients without the vendors' needing to also sell an expensive “interface solution.”

NoMoreClipboard.com is serving as the lead contractor on a $1.25 million grant from the federal Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The grant is funding NoMoreClipboard’s efforts to develop standardized solutions for the health information technology industry to make patient data secure and portable.

NoMoreClipboard is a subsidiary of Fort-Wayne-based Medical Informatics Engineering, which in the 1990s developed Med-Web, one of the first health information exchanges in the nation.

California-based Google launched its Google Health personal health record in 2008 but announced it was shutting down the service this summer. Seattle-based Microsoft Corp. is still offering its personal health record, HealthVault.