Are you ready for the Blue Button?

Background -

On August 3rd President Obama announced the advent of a new button: The Blue Button. The Blue Button is a health data download button. Consumers can presumably click on the Blue Button and their medical records will then commence downloading to their computer (securely, of course). Anybody can get a complete medical record on demand; with no delays from the busy medical records department and no special fees and no rims and rims of paper records to carry around. Sounds like an awesome step forward for medical records portability.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will make Blue Buttons available for Medicare beneficiaries and so is the Veterans Administration (VA). The Markle Foundation issued a policy paper and a challenge to developers to do something meaningful with the Blue Button data (in partnership with Health 2.0). Statistically about about 30% of the U.S. population will have full electronic access to their medical records by virtue of a Blue Button.

Some Early Blue Button Implementations –

The VA delivers health care and it has an EHR (VistA) and gigantic amounts of electronic medical records to share. The VA also has a website, My HealtheVet, where members can access their latest medical records, view benefits and perform simple transactions, such as requesting meds refills and updating information. My HealtheVet, which is truly a PHR, will now be sporting a Blue Button, so members can download their electronic medical records in ASCII text format. The VA has a sample download file and it looks very useful.

CMS, on the other hand, is basically a payer. CMS will be adding the Blue Button to their member portal, MyMedicare, where claim data will be available for download and also, what seems to be, Self Entered clinical data. Presumably Medicare beneficiaries will update their clinical histories and then push the button to download the file, also in ASCII text format. Unlike the VA, CMS is not quite ready to allow beneficiaries to download this data to their own computers, but prefers that the data is transferred to a commercial PHR instead (e.g. Google Health, Microsoft Health Vault).

Getting Ready for the Blue Button –

Before your can offer blue button Electronic Medical Records (EMR) access to your  patients, you need to get one of our “green button” scanning solutions in place in your office. Why? Because most practices still have tons of paper-based records and a Xerox document scanning solution, based upon one of our modern multifunction devices is the fastest and most reliable way to turn those documents into electronic images that can be stored and retrieved by blue button applications. Xerox, along with numerous solutions partners offers everything from simple scanning and forwarding software all the way to sophisticated, fully features EMR applications. And they all start with the Xerox Green Button. Call me and let's discuss how you can get ready for the demands o fthe Blue Button.