Electronic health records have suffered another chink to their proverbial armor in the popular press. Or more specifically, PHRs are the target of this article from the unfortunately struggling Boston Globe. One patient's Google PHR drew information from insurance claims data, which is "notoriously inaccurate" and "notoriously incomplete," according to one health IT expert quoted in the article. Including claims data in its PHRs is apparently a standard practice for Google Health. And that claims data is where this particular problem started.

This, from the article, concerning the patient, Dave deBronkart:

Google said his cancer had spread to either his brain or spine - a frightening diagnosis deBronkart had never gotten from his doctors - and listed an array of other conditions that he never had, as far as he knew, like chronic lung disease and aortic aneurysm. A warning announced his blood pressure medication required "immediate attention."

Obviously this was a bit traumatic for the patient. And it has some doctors worried, too.

Google's PHR problems apparently stem from their reliance on coding data to describe patients' medical conditions in the PHRs. Health IT leaders from Google and Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital (where deBronkart, the patient, receives treatment) say PHRs are a new technology and "will improve as more precise coding language is adopted in the coming years."

That's probably a safe bet, but until then, what's a PHR user to do? Monitor your records like a hawk, deBronkart implies. My guess, though, is that if and when these PHR problems receive more widespread attention, many doctors will advise their patients to avoid electronic records in the first place, instead waiting a few years until the technological kinks get ironed out. And that doesn't bode too well for the federal government's stated goal that all American citizens have an electronic health record by 2014.