The State of California Office of Health Information Integrity (CalOHII) awarded contracts to three organizations to participate in an electronic Personal Health Record (PHR) demonstration project. Currently, there is nothing that exists to aid Health Information Service Providers (HISP), Health Information Organizations, or providers in evaluating the suitability of PHRs for inclusion in their delivery of care. The pilot will help establish policies and procedures for identifying use cases and PHRs.
The first award went to Humetrix, in Del Mar, California. The project will enable providers to send EMRs directly to the iBlueButton mobile app using a mechanism developed in partnership between CalOHII and the National Association for Trusted Exchange (NATE).
Humetrix will work directly with the San Diego Regional HIE (SDRHIE) and with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to provide patients with their own iBlueButton to enable mobile HIE. This will empower patients to share their SDRIE or VHA health records with any provider at the point-of-care.
The second award went to the University of California at San Diego, to the Department of Emergency Medicine. The pilot will test and demonstrate secure and reliable bidirectional transport of patient data between end users of the NATE community HISPs and patient-owned PHRs created in Microsoft Healthvault.
The project will use existing community resources to test data in a standard structured exchange format from an existing community HIE as well as new data from innovative environmental and patient monitoring systems such as the (DELPHI) Project and CitiSense. These systems have the ability to assess scalability and interoperability.
The third award went to the Santa Cruz HIE to develop a pilot to demonstrate an alternative solution to EHR tethered portals. Patients will be provided with a patient controlled aggregated PHR record to be maintained in “No More Clipboard”.
Patients will be able to view their PHR from participating providers and facilities with most of the patients’ data available from the HIE. If a patient changes doctors or insurance, then their data goes with them. The project will validate and manage the patient’s identification in a multi-stakeholder environment, and test sharing data using emerging standards such as Blue Button and Direct. The demonstration will also enable patients to have the ability for bi-directional communication between physicians and patients.