Leading Pharmacies and Retailers Join National Effort to Provide Patients with Easy Access to Personal Health Information

The White House Office of Science and Technology recently released this blog post:

By Nick Sinai and Adam Dole

Today, as part of the growing movement to help customers access and securely share their own health information, several of the Nation’s largest retail pharmacy chains and associations are pledging to support the Blue Button initiative—a public-private partnership between the health care industry and the Federal Government that aims to empower all Americans with access to their own electronic health information. These steps will help patients access their prescription information and further empower millions of Americans to better manage their healthcare.

The concept behind Blue Button is simple: consumers should be able to securely access their own health information and share it with health care providers, caregivers, and others they trust.

In 2010, with the support of the White House, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) launched the Blue Button initiative to give veterans the ability to access and download their health records on a secure, online patient portal. Since then, the initiative has expanded and more than 150 million Americans today are able to use Blue Button-enabled tools to access their own health information from a variety of sources including healthcare providers, health insurance companies, medical labs, and state health information networks.

An increasingly important part of the Blue Button initiative is making patient information available in secure, simple, standard formats to help spur the development of innovative consumer applications and devices that can help patients better manage their own health care and facilitate the electronic sharing of data with trusted partners, such as medical specialists who might not otherwise have direct access to relevant records.  

That’s why the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)—with input from more than 70 organizations—recently released “Blue Button+”, a set of technical guidelines to help providers structure their data in standardized machine-readable formats.  And the vast majority of doctors and hospitals will be working to use the Blue Button+ standards beginning this year as part of their participation in the Federal Electronic Health Record incentive program.

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