Feds tout Blue Button, push patient engagement

Pushing the Blue Button was what a parade of government and private-sector health information technology leaders did—often and with gusto—during a series of panel discussions in Washington to kick off Health IT Week.

The "silly little ASCII file," as Peter Levin, chief technology officer at the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department described it, is now the format of copies of electronic medical records accessible by more than 1 million VA patients who have registered to use the VA-developed Blue Button system that launched in 2010. Named for a Blue Button on the VA's personal health-record system that activates the mechanism, it enables veterans to access their records is the VA's VistA EHR system and copy them in either the plain-text ASCII or PDF formats.

Speaking at a consumer health information technology summit, Levin said the VA plans "in a couple of days" to add veterans' immunization records to those records already accessible via the Blue Button technology.

Levin joined Dr. Farzad Mostashari, head of HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, and Todd Park, federal CTO, to tout government plans to work with the private sector to expand Blue Button use.

The goal, Mostashari said, is to increase the ranks of Blue Button users from 1 million to 10 million and then to "the entire country."

Mostashari said that in gathering feedback from users meeting the Stage 1 meaningful-use targets of the federally funded EHR incentive payment program, two-thirds of hospitals reported they could easily provide electronic copies of patient records but that "nobody asked" for their records. Many said that "not a single patient during the reporting period asked for an electronic copy of their record," Mostashari reported.

So, in the recently released Stage 2 criteria, which take effect in 2014, the government sought to make providers "more accountable" for encouraging patients to ask for copies. One criterion is that providers must ensure that at least 5% of their patients access their records electronically, Mostashari said. "It moves us from a personal health record tethered to this particular provider, this particular health plan, this particular data source, to a patient-controlled medical record," he said.

Park, a former health IT entrepreneur and the CTO of HHS, said patients "are the most underused and potent resource in all of healthcare." Improved patient access to data could mean the difference between life and death, he said.

Three of 18 entrepreneurs brought into a Presidential Innovation Fellows program to match them with government IT innovators are working on ways to better use the Blue Button technology in the public and private sectors. Patients who have ready access to their records will be better able to help spot errors and participate in their care, Park said.

"The time is now, and no work in healthcare is more important than giving patients their own data and empowering them to improve their own care," he said.

Health IT Week activities run through Friday.