By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD
What do the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report and the New England Journal of Medicine article on value in health care by Porter have in common?
They call for increasing aggregation of information around individual patients even as they seek to avoid complications for and interference with providers.
Even so, the debate between provider-centered and patient-centered health information exchange is still very much with us. Recent progress with the Direct Project, Blue Button and Kaiser’s donation of terminology suggest a trend toward simplicity and open-source collaboration as essential catalysts for health information exchange.
The next logical step is a PCAST-inspired patient portal.
The essential elements of a PCAST Patient Portal are already available:
- Blue Button success proves that patients appreciate and will adopt enhanced portal features and that providers can readily connect their databases to the portal if the technical and policy requirements are truly minimal.
- The Direct Project shows that combined federal and industry support can produce accessible open source code for bidirectional health information exchange in record time.
