Your Smartphone Might Hold Key To Your Medical Records

By Elizabeth Stawicki
Minnesota Public Radio
JUN 17, 2013

It's one of those unhappy holiday surprises -- a visiting family member gets sick. That happened to Dr. Farzad Mostashari last Thanksgiving.

"My dad comes downstairs and he has acute pain in his eye where he had cataract surgery. And I said, 'What's the matter, what's the story?'" recalled Mostashari, who lives in Bethesda, Md. "And he said, 'Well, I think they put the wrong lens in my eye, I'd gone back to the doctor and...'" His father didn't remember exactly what had happened at his last doctor's appointment and the office was closed anyway.

How could a local doctor in Maryland access his dad's medical record in Boston? Through Medicare Blue Button, a computer program that allows patients to download their medical history into a simple text file on their smartphones and personal computers. Then third-party applications that you download help organize this information.

Mostashari certainly knew how to handle his dad's problem. After all, he's the coordinator for health information technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and it's his passion and profession to promote electronic health records.

And, he had signed his dad up for Blue Button, which downloads three years of a patient's medical history, as well as the Humetrix iBlueButton, a smartphone app that translates and displays the information in a simple-to-understand way. The file includes names, phone numbers and addresses of physicians as well as diagnoses, lab tests, imaging studies, and medications.

So when Mostashari took his father to a local doctor, his dad was able to hand over his iPhone and say, "Here's my history."

The entire story is here.

Here is a link to Medicare's Blue Button program.

ONC advancing Blue Button, CDS standards efforts

Automating the Blue Button to Exchange PHI

Mary Mosquera
Senior Editor, Government Health IT
Originally published on September 26, 2012

Developers in an ONC voluntary community are beginning to drill down into what will be required to automate the Blue Button feature to exchange patient health information at the consumer’s request under different scenarios.

The Blue Button enables patients to view and download their information in simple text format and is currently available to veterans, military service members and Medicare beneficiaries. A few private sector health organizations have begun to make it available to their members.

The ONC’s Standards & Interoperability Framework community has just created three panels to identify standards and tools to push personal data to a specific location, such as using Direct secure messaging protocols and the Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), and allowing a third-party application to access personal health data on demand, in a pull transmission, according to Doug Fridsma, MD, director of ONC’s Office of Standards and Interoperability and acting chief scientist.

The entire story is here.