Personal Health Records and Patient-Oriented Infrastructures: Building Technology, Shaping (New) Patients, and Healthcare Practitioners

The Personal Health Record (PHR) is an umbrella label that refers to a family of digital Information and Communication Technologies under direct patient control which has gained momentum in the last decade. The “Personally Controlled Health Record”, a phrasing used in the early days and now almost abandoned, could be considered a more accurate label as it points to the revolutionary feature of such technologies. ‘Revolutionary’ is here used in its etymological sense, in that providing patient access and control over their clinical data was a part of a more general movement of transforming a provider-centred care into a patient-centric one.