As Patient Engagement Advances, It Raises Questions About Usefulness

Reading ONC’s recent summary of patient engagement capabilities at US hospitals left me feeling both hopeful and wistful. The ONC, as usual, is trying to show off how much progress the field of health IT has made since Meaningful Use started, and the statistics in this dashboard meet those goals. On the other hand, I look at the statistics and wonder when real patient empowerment will emerge from these isolated gains. The ONC dashboard includes information both on raw data exchange–what Meaningful Use called view, download, and transmit (VDT)–and the uses of that data, which ultimately mean much more than exchange. I considered at first how important I would find it to download hospital information. I certainly would like my doctors to get the results of tests performed there, and other information related to my status upon discharge, but these supposedly are sent to the primary care physician in a Continuity of Care Document (CCD). If I or a close relative of mine had a difficult or chronic condition, I would certainly benefit from VDT because I would have to be an active advocate and would need the documentation. My point here is that our real goal in health reform is coordinated care, rather than data transfer, and while VDT is an important first step, we must always ask who is using that information. The ONC did not ask the hospitals how much of their data patients can download. God is in the details, and I am not confident that an affirmative answer to ...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: MACRA Meaningful Use Patient Advocacy Patient Portal Advanced Interoperability Data Exchange EHR Patient Engagement Meaningful Use Patient Engagement Patient Empowerment Patient-Generated Data Source Type: blogs