Next month, the Hartford, Conn.-based insurer will begin offering the Aetna Care Engine Powered Personal Health Record (PHR) to 1 million of its clients. The remaining 14 million members will be able to access the PHR during the second quarter of the year.

In addition to allowing patients online access to health care information obtained from Aetna's claims, the PHR also will allow users to update records with their own submissions, such as blood pressure readings taken at home.

An analytic engine developed by Aetna subsidiary ActiveHealth Management Inc. will analyze daily the information in the PHR and notify a patient if anything in the data falls out of line with commonly accepted best practices, said Robert Heyl, architect manager of Aetna's E-Health business unit. For example, he said, if a physician prescribes a medication that would have an adverse reaction with medicine prescribed by another doctor, a patient would be called and e-mailed about the potential problem.

Electronic health records are increasingly being adopted by insurers and large employers as a way to reduce duplicate testing, medical errors and other problems that can lead to higher health care costs. The records allow consumers to share their data with health care providers rather than depend on fragmented health history data maintained by multiple physicians and hospitals. Aetna was among thousands of insurance companies with a total of 200 million customers that support for a common set of standards for creating and managing electronic health records.

Aetna will feed claims data to ActiveHealth through Web services messages, Heyl said. ActiveHealth will use its Care Engine analytic software to compare that data to a large set of rules developed by physicians for 30 different medical conditions, he added. ActiveHealth also adds data from laboratories and pharmacies to the PHR.