Nutrition labels were introduced to the public back in the 90s by the Food and Drug Administration. These have proven to be popular with consumers who are concerned about what they eat. As recently as this year, there was much concern over trans fat content in fast food, especially the fried variety. Thanks to nutrition labels, such information is readily available for consumers to check out on pretty much every fast food franchise's website.

A similar effort is underway to add a "nutrition label" of sorts to personal health record websites. The department of health and human services has made this research available to the industry and for consumers who use PHRs. This label has been dubbed as the "Leavitt Label", named after the presiding Secretary of HHS, Mike Leavitt. Here is the text from HHS...

"Project Purpose

The project purpose is to develop a “plain language” model PHR fact sheet that will enable consumers to clearly understand and compare privacy policies across PHRs. The final product is envisioned to be a template for a web-based PHR fact sheet for vendors to use to deliver complex PHR privacy and security information simply and clearly so that consumers can make informed decisions, similar to the nutrition label that provides a format for consumers to quickly learn nutritional information about a food or the financial services industry model privacy notice that dictates how the financial institutions inform consumers about financial privacy information practices."

Source: http://www.os.dhhs.gov/healthit/privacy/notice.html

Here is a sample notice for a fictional company called Birch Health (a vendor of PHR).