The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Veterans Affairs Department plan to add a feature to their electronic patient portals to let beneficiaries download their personal health information into a patient health record or other electronic media of their choosing.
To date, veterans and seniors have been able only to review their data on CMS's MyMedicare.gov and VA's MyHealtheVet patient Web portals. The "blue button" initiative, named for a new electronic button on the portal sites, will let patients use their data in any way they choose, said Todd Park, HHS's chief technology officer.
"We and VA decided to do "blue button" together and explored it collaboratively," he said. The Medicare patient portal contains information from claims data, while the veterans' portal includes medication lists, prescription information and health education.
The blue button will be added to the portals this fall, Park said.
The announcement comes a week after HHS unveiled its Community Health Data Initiative to make the wealth of health data it keeps easily available to the public as well as to entrepreneurs in the hope that they will create new applications and tools to improve healthcare.
"Consumers are anxious to see what innovators can do with patient level data," Park said a Health 2.0 conference last week devoted to collaborative healthcare technologies.
The conference provided a sampling of tools and applications designed to make healthcare more patient-centered. For instance, dLife provides computer, mobile phone and online video education programs to help patients manage their diabetes and improve their A1c measures.
DLife, which has begun a customized program with Geisinger Health System, collects metrics from patients on their progress, said Howard Steinberg, dLife's chief executive officer. The emphasis is "engaging people with diabetes knowledge and have them keep coming back," he said.
In another example, iGuard provides a medication monitoring service that incorporates data from the Food and Drug Administration to alert consumers to any potential adverse drug interactions they might face. It also can help researchers contact medication users, said Hugo Stephenson, its CEO. Patients can access the site online directly, through Microsoft's HealthVault personal health record and from other services.
