SAN DIEGO – Health plans have a golden opportunity to add value and engage their membership by creating personal health records for them, said a panel discussing the importance of payer-based PHRs at the America’s Health Insurance Plans annual meeting last month.

Health plans are in the best position to administer PHRs because they have a one-to-one relationship with members, have the existing infrastructure to create PHRs and already “organize” most of the U.S. healthcare system, said Jeffrey Margolis, chair and CEO of The TriZetto Group.

“Health plans can and should create a PHR for every plan member,” he said.

PHRs should be accessible to all relevant stakeholders via all communication channels, personalized, data rich, secure, proactive and portable.

Margolis called on health plans to practice what he called “co-opetition” instead of competition to allow continuity and portability of PHRs as members move from health plan to health plan.

“We believe that PHRs are pivotal to transformation,” said William Barr, executive vice president of healthcare operations for The Regence Group.

Instead of focusing on decreasing costs and increasing information, Barr said that health plans should focus on creating a real value proposition and engaging its membership.

“We have to look at PHRs from the member perspective,” he said. “It has to be a member-focused solution. It’s about the consumer view into provider data.”

While the industry has been pushing consumer-centric products, Barr said health plans have yet to create tools to take charge.

Therefore, PHRs need to provide better information to consumers that will allow them to make better healthcare decisions, govern their own health data, populate their own information to detail how they want to influence their own health plan, have access to lots of information and have a more effective dialogue between them and their providers.

Barr stressed that PHRs are but one component of the overall healthcare transformation and solution. Despite the issues of trust, security and privacy, health plans can provide the elements needed to flesh out PHRs, benefit design, financial information, quality data and health risk assessments, according to Joshua Raskin, senior vice president and senior analyst for Lehman Brothers.