Endorsing a path towards a "meaningful use" definition
Thursday, April 30, 2009
After weeks of collaboration with a diverse group of organizations, today Google endorsed the Markle Foundation's framework on Meaningful Use and Certification. The framework outlines criteria for hospitals and physicians wishing to qualify for the health IT-related federal stimulus funds in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Among other things, the ARRA allows providers to qualify for health IT funding if they demonstrate that they are making a "meaningful use" of information technology. We think it's critically important that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) considers patient access to their digitized medical records via electronic health records (EHRs) when considering how to define "meaningful use."
Though Google Health will not directly receive stimulus funding (we are not asking for any), we see the framework as a critical step for moving the healthcare industry towards solutions that we believe will improve patient care. Simply put, we'd like to see the movement from paper-based medical records to digital records achieve its vast potential. Patient access to digitized medical records via EHRs helps people prevent illness, manage their health-related information and transactions, coordinate care and communicate with clinicians, understand health care costs, and take better care of loved ones.
As a provider of Google Health, a personal health record (PHR) service, we also believe it is very important that consumers have choice and ownership of where and how they want to store their data. We support the concepts of data portability, so that you can take your data with you no matter what hospital or delivery network you're being treated in, as well as healthcare data interoperability, so that you can transfer your information among multiple systems.
This isn't the first time we've supported a Markle Foundation framework -- in June 2008 we endorsed the Common Framework for Networked Personal Health Information, which proposed a set of important privacy principles for personal health records (PHRs), and we've since adopted these concepts within Google Health.
Improving the United States' healthcare system is a complex topic with many interlocking components. The system’s size and complexity as well as the inherent challenges in the fields of medicine and public health make this a major undertaking. This framework's effort to improve consumer access to online data is an important step, and it builds upon Markle's previous work.
> We think it's critically important that HHS
ReplyDelete> considers patient access to their digitized
> medical records via electronic health records
> (EHRs) when considering how to define
> "meaningful use."
Huzzah!
I expect that the systems implemented under ARRA's incentives will be with us for at least ten years. A lot changes in ten years - think back ten years to 1999, when blogging was in its infancy.
Consider where we'll want to be medically ten years from now. Consider the likelihood that somebody you care about will have a medical crisis by then, and you will want to help in every way you can.
I haven't studied this subject, much less thought everything through. But I have a few requirements I'd want any solution to fulfill for patient access.
I want my health record to be a great tool I can share with my physicians.
It should import and export data easily, gathering data from multiple providers. Note: I don't mean detailed diagnostic info, except as free text, but I certainly mean every bit of quantified or discrete information.
And access to my images. In full diagnostic quality, so other docs can look at them.
It should support shared access by physicians and patient and authorized caregivers, so each party can cross-check the other one's entries for simple typos and other errors.
I want to be able to grant read-only or read-write access to others, with audit trails including Wikipedia-style rewinds.
Considering what I pay for cable TV each month, and my internet connection, when the going gets rough medically I'd certainly pay a subscription for this. Or maybe my insurance company would. When I was 20 I wouldn't, so probably some freemium model would work.
Anyway, it would be a horrid mistake not to require REAL industrial-strength patient access. Not every patient wants to jump in with both feet, but for those of us who do, for heaven's sake let us help.
I applaud this position by google on patient record access.
ReplyDeleteI am president of ICMCC (a non-profit foundation) and we provide the only internet information platform on Record Access (http://recordaccess.icmcc.org).
We have composed a recommendation on Patient Record Access, which recently, via one of the leading UK authorities, has reached Dr. Chan from the WHO. You can find it at http://recordaccess.icmcc.org/category/WHO.
More of what we as an organisation think concerning EHR and RA, you can find in the speeches and blog entries on the main website, www.icmcc.org.
Lodewijk Bos
President ICMCC