Tonight, I checked out the always-interesting #HITsm TweetChat, which attracted a nice group of informed HIT experts. (It takes place from 8PM to 9PM Central Time on Mondays — I highly recommend you attend sometime.)

While the conversation wandered, as professional chats always do, one theme that came up a few times was the importance of PHRs in the overall healthcare data picture. I watched with interest, since I’m a real PHR skeptic and wondered if anyone had a  breakthrough idea on the subject.

One poster — if I understood him correctly — noted that while he didn’t trust Google or Microsoft PHRs, he’d manage his own health data gladly if it was stored on a very secure, easy-to-populate tool like financial site Mint.com.  I thought this was a tremendously good idea.

For those who haven’t used it, Mint.com allows consumers to suck data from bank and credit card accounts, loans and more into a single interface, making it easy to check on and edit the data with a few clicks.  Not only that, it allows you to create analytical charts, monitor for problems and set goals.  Just imagine how useful those functions could be for personal health maintenance.

Having used Mint.com happily for my personal finances, I yearn for the day when health data is equally accessible and manageable.  It’s easy to imagine — though admittedly, a tall order technically — interesting consumers in building out PHRs if they had access to a simple interface and secure connections to all needed data.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any PHR that’s quite this sophisticated. Is it time for Intuit (Mint’s owner) to go into the PHR business?

There’s no doubt that Practice Fusion has been making a big splash in the world of EMR. They were the first EMR company that I’d seen that was pioneering the “free” ad based EMR on the web. You can read more about my first impressions of their free EMR offering on EMR and HIPAA. This interview with the CEO of Practice Fusion is pretty interesting as well.

Now Practice Fusion has made the next logical step and added a PHR front end for patients to be able to access their clinical record. From the look of the screenshots (see below), I’m not seeing anything particularly special about the PHR. In fact, I’d likely say that this isn’t much more than an initial PHR offering. Since it is their initial offering, I guess that makes sense. Certainly they’ll be building it out over time.

What I find more interesting about this new PHR is that Practice Fusion built the PHR on top of Sales Force. SaleseForce.com recently made an investment in Practice Fusion and so this seems to be an extension of that partnership. I see this as a really interesting move for Practice Fusion to build a healthcare application on top of the Force.com cloud. It also will be interesting for SalesForce.com to enter the healthcare space.

Check out the following screenshots of the PHR application: