Automating the Blue Button to Exchange PHI

Mary Mosquera
Senior Editor, Government Health IT

Developers in an ONC voluntary community are beginning to drill down into what will be required to automate the Blue Button feature to exchange patient health information at the consumer’s request under different scenarios.

The Blue Button enables patients to view and download their information in simple text format and is currently available to veterans, military service members and Medicare beneficiaries. A few private sector health organizations have begun to make it available to their members.

The ONC’s Standards & Interoperability Framework community has just created three panels to identify standards and tools to push personal data to a specific location, such as using Direct secure messaging protocols and the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), and allowing a third-party application to access personal health data on demand, in a pull transmission, according to Doug Fridsma, MD, director of ONC’s Office of Standards and Interoperability and acting chief scientist.

The standards and specifications would enable patients to not only download their health information to their personal computer, but also to privately and securely automate the sending of that data from their healthcare providers to their personal health records, email accounts, health-related applications, or other preferred holding place.

This will support the meaningful use stage 2 requirement that patients be able to view, download and transmit their health information to a personal health record or other location, he said at the Sept. 19 advisory Health IT Standards Committee meeting.

Developers are also considering Continue Reading Full Article Post…