NY-Based HIE Captures One Million Patient Consents

One of the big obstacles to the free exchange of health data is obtaining patient consent to share that data. It’s all well and good if we can bring exchange partners onto a single data sharing format, but if patients don’t consent to that exchange things get ugly. It’s critical that healthcare organizations solve this problem, because without patient consent HIEs are dead in the water. Given these issues, I was intrigued to read a press release from HEALTHeLINK, an HIE serving Western New York, which announced that it had obtained one million patient consents to share their PHI. HEALTHeLINK connects nearly 4,600 physicians, along with hospitals, health plans and other healthcare providers. It’s part of a larger HIE, the Statewide Health Information Network of New York. How did HEALTHeLINK obtain the consents? Apparently, there was no magic involved. The HIE made consent forms available at hospitals and doctors’ offices throughout its network, as well as making the forms available for download at whyhealthelink.com. (It may also have helped that they can be downloaded in any of 12 languages.) I downloaded the consent form myself, and I must say it’s not complicated. Patients only need to fill out a single page, which gives them the option to a) permit participating providers to access all of their electronic health information via the HIE, b) allow full access to the data except for specific participants, c) permit health data sharing only with specific participan...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Health Insurance Exchanges Healthcare Healthcare Interoperability HealthCare IT HIE Hospital EHR Medical Privacy Health Data Sharing HEALTHeLINK Patient Consent PHI P Source Type: blogs