The recently installed "blue button" on the Veteran Affairs Department's MyHealtheVet portal represents a first step toward the type of full access to their personal health records veterans can expect to see when the VA stands up the virtual lifetime electronic record (VLER).
That was how Peter Levin, the VA's chief technology officer described the relationship between the blue button project and VLER, the ambitious VA-Defense Department plan to track the health, benefits and administrative records of people from the day they are inducted into the military through the remainder of their lives as veterans.
"I think the blue button is the first instance of what the patient will see with VLER, but the operative phrase here is what the patient will see," Levin said in an interview.
By clicking the button, veterans can download emergency contacts and demographic information from the MyHealtheVet site into a personal health record (PHR) on their computer and print it out or share it via a flash drive with other providers inside and outside of VA.
MyHealtheVet contains information to let veterans track their health status, refill prescriptions and learn about health resources available to them.
Recently, the VA added wellness reminders and a prescription medication list to the list of records that can be accessed via the blue button, more sophisticated categories of information that now reside on VistA, VA's long-lived electronic medical record system.
Levin said the blue button represented a "very thin thread and tenuous link to VistA," but nonetheless would help providers meet a level of meaningful use of their EHRs.
"The information that is going to truly impact accessibility, cost and outcome and "...more meaningfully help our service providers both inside and outside the VA meet the specifications of meaningful use are more in VistA than they are in MyHealtheVet," Levin said.
MyHealtheVet is fundamentally "a memory bank" for information that veterans want to remember about themselves, Levin said. Just being able to download that memory bank to a PHR would be "a substantial benefit to veterans" because it is "clip board" information patients typically fill out at a physician office visit, he said.
"But we really wanted to do more, if only to show that it can be done," he said. "That's why we went with two relatively easy components of the VistA record."
VLER will incorporate the complete electronic medical record, while the blue button is a mechanism to make it easier to fill in a PHR for registration convenience and tracking one's health, he said. "But there might be some critical applications, and I expect that there will be clinical information. But we're starting with the easy ones first," Levin said.
Levin compared the blue button to Internet banking services, where customers can download summary data and recent transactions from their financial records. But oer time, banks have added more applications and information to the customer's account site.
VA is beginning to consider the next VistA data sets that will be available to veterans through the blue button for their PHRs, Levin said.
