Patients want their medical records, seriously!
Patients want their medical records — not in 30 days — but today. Not only do they want their information now, they don’t want to be denied access to it at all. That is the present demand. However, as we all tip-toe uphill trying to figure out how to make this possible, we end up creating products that don’t necessarily produce outcomes let alone exhibit interoperability.
CMS administrator Andy Slavitt claimed that difficult standards to reach interoperability will soon be dropped, leaving the arena open to vendors to work together to gain a true health data exchange platform.
According to a HealthMine survey, 53% of patients said they were still unable to retrieve all of their health information electronically. This is a problem. Isn’t that what Meaningful Use and CMS reimbursement programs were for? According to the same survey, 74% of respondents wanted easy electronic access to their health data so that they could make better health decisions.
To make it easier for patients to retrieve their medical records, the Department of Health and Human Services has created some new guidelines for medical record request procedures. For example, patients do not have to have any particular reason for requesting their medical records and cannot therefore be denied access to their medical information. Doctors and hospitals must fulfill medical record requests ideally before the 30-day period…
Are these guidelines really new? Effectual even?
Even if patients did not have a reason to request their medical records or they received it within 30-days, there’s still a power complex at play here between who really owns that medical information. That’s why personal health record (PHR) vendors are vital to the medical record retrieval process. They need to be held to a higher standard and gain funding according to standard and functionality, not popular partnerships. Who cares about who you know if your product doesn’t actually work?
What this means for PHR vendors is that they MUST work together. They must see interoperability as a national goal and they must combine their strengths, much like what MediPortal did in joining the CommonWell Health Alliance.
It does not matter what individual PHR vendors feel about their own triumph to the top, this cannot be a singular victory, not if genuine concern for patient outcomes and medical information access is the real goal. Patients are serious about having their data and it seems that the CMS is serious about swerving anyone who doesn’t want to make that happen.
