A trade association representing almost 1,300 insurance companies with 200 million customers announced last week that all of its members have agreed to support a common set of standards for creating and managing electronic personal health records.

America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) – an industry trade organization – compiled the standards with Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. Scott Serota, president and CEO of the Chicago-based Blue Cross network, said that all 39 Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in the U.S. are aiming to offer standards-based personal health records (PHRs) to their 98 million clients by the end of 2008.

“Health plans have existing relationships with patients and providers, and we can help ensure widespread adoption and use these PHRs nationally,” Serota said. “We need to have a seamless, interoperable nationwide system that will serve all members.” He said 13 of the Blue Cross plans have PHRs in place, and 12 others have plans under development.

The CEO of AHIP in Washington said that the companies will use insurance claims data to populate the PHRs. The claims data “can help patients record their experiences,” she explained. “The plan allows test and lab results to be captured in a secure, Web-based environment.” An outside observer might point out that the security of web-based private information systems remains an open question.

Ron Williams, CEO of Aetna Inc., likened the effort to the development of common standards created by the banking industry for the ATM system. That is a reasonable comparison, but only to a point. The ATM system does not pass along financial transaction data from one bank to another. As presented, the PHR program would be information gathering based on insurance claims. To the untrained eye, that looks like an instant risk analysis on any person with a record in the database.