Why we ’ re launching a Consumer Directed Exchange (CDEx) project

If your first question is “what’s Consumer Directed Exchange?” please feel free to google it and come back. Last week, Alliance for Better Health launched the first regional effort in the United States toward facilitating CDEx for Medicaid Members. Here’s my short (?) version of what/why/how We consumers (people?) are becoming increasingly aware of the information that others have acquired about us.  We implicitly trust Facebook, Google, Apple, etc. to keep our information safe, and share it with others only when we choose.  As health care has evolved from paper, there is now an extraordinary quantity of our health information that is stored digitally in hospitals, medical offices, and (yes – see above) Apple, Google, etc.  When a provider of health care services needs your health information so that they can better serve you (or serve you at all), they can sometimes access this information through traditional means of health information exchange.  There are several ways to do this, and I won’t cover them today.  A short overview is here.  Note that there is a difference between the activity of health information exchange (the verb) and an HIE (Health Information Exchange – the noun). We usually give permission for care providers to exchange our information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the important but often overlooked HITECH Modifications to HIPAA provide the framework for how, when and...
Source: Docnotes - Category: Primary Care Authors: Tags: Consumer Source Type: blogs