Ben Butler of Crowell & Moring call my attention to this excellent overview of PHR initiatives from Modern Healthcare. I was interested in learning that

On June 30, the CMS awarded contracts to perform feasibility studies on creating PHRs using claims data from existing Medicare fee-for-service programs. One of the winners was Capstone Government Solutions, Nashville, a for-profit consortium formed in 2004 by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Tennessee and Cigna Government Services, an arm of publicly traded Cigna Corp. ViPS, a business unit of Elmwood Park, N.J.-based Emdeon Corp., formerly WebMD Corp., was awarded the second PHR pilot contract.

There’s not much news, however, about the status of the major House health information technology bill, HR 4157, which probably means that there’s a lot going on in the proverbial smoke filled rooms on Capitol Hill. The current AMA News does report that the medical community joins the insurance community in opposing to Rep Nancy Johnson’s 10/09 ICD-10 mandate in the Ways and Means version of HR 4157.