Cures Act is much bigger than just patients asking for their information. The ONC has defined a new data format how clinical information is to be shared. The goal is to have one single universal format so we all speak the same language. I'll outline a typical use case you could experience ..If you think about it you'll see there are many holes that ONC has not considered as part of the equation and what I list is only the tip of the iceburg.
-Patient subscribes to a mobile application (i.e BlueButton) which offers the ability to access all of their medical information (Portal data) across multiple providers so they don't have to log into 3 different portals.
- Patient calls your practice and asks you to send their information to BlueButton. This is real time, all the time, for every service you enter for this patient.
- The Practice will access a new data sharing application provided within the EHR and registers patient for data sharing with BlueButton.
- This new application will provide the patients credentials (username and password) they need to enter in BlueButton so BB can pull their data down the the BB servers
- All clinical data, and all future services, for this patient will be sent to a central data sharing server we host that manages requests from Bluebutton and all the other 3rd parties. . They do not retrieve data from your server. We will send the data from your server to our Master Data sharing server that manages all these requests from 3rd parties.
- Patient also calls their other providers and requests the same access for BB
- BlueButton retrieves patient data from our shared server, and also retrieves the data from the patients' other EHR practices, and presents it to the patient in aggregate..
Just think about this for a moment...There are so many unknowns at this point. The one thing that is certain is we must have this completed, certified by the ONC and installed at all practices who participate in MIPS by the end of this year. Now, no one may ever call your practice and ask for this. Or maybe they start calling next year. Can you say you don't want to play? There's no clear cut answer on that either. Is it information blocking since you can provide the patient with their information in a variety of other forms. There's no clear cut answer on that either..But what I describe above is the objective for CURES..the end game is to provide the patient with complete clinical data access to "an application of their choosing" and create a robust competitive marketplace that will foster the development of new applications
Of course there is a cost to the practice for this which is unknown at this point in time. We'll have more information available as we get closer to release later this year.
