The Game Has Now Changed And It Is Now Clear That The MyHealth Record is Rapidly Becoming Obsolete.

The following very important announcement appeared last week:

Epic unveils interoperability tool for patients

The EHR vendor says Share Everywhere is designed to empower MyChart users to allow clinicians to view medical records.

By Bernie Monegain

September 14, 2017 01:39 PM

Epic Systems introduced its Share Everywhere feature, which enables patients to grant doctors and caregivers access to their data.

Not to be confused with the EHR vendor’s Care Everywhere, which enables health information sharing between providers, Epic’s Share Everywhere gives patients more control over the data sharing process. 

Here’s how it works. A patient already using Epic’s MyChart patient portal can tap into the Share Everywhere feature to generate a one-time access code that the patient would verbally tell the doctor, according to an Epic spokesperson. 

The clinician, in turn, would take that code to a Share Everywhere website and verify it against the patient’s date of birth. 

“In addition to having a view of the patient's record, the doctor would be able to enter a progress note regarding the visit, which would be sent back to the patient's home provider,” the spokesperson said.

Because the patient determines exactly who gets that access, Epic said their privacy is protected. 

John Halamka, MD, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which said this year that is merging with Epic customer Lahey Health, said Share Everywhere supports two types of interoperability that hospitals need.   

“Interoperability needs to have two approaches: caregiver to caregiver, if that’s what the patient wants, caregiver to patient to caregiver, for those who want to be stewards of their own data,” Halamka said. 

More here:

http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/epic-unveils-interoperability-tool-patients

There was also coverage here:

Health IT Expert Tripathi Digs Deep on Impact of Epic’s Share Everywhere Release

September 15, 2017

by Rajiv Leventhal

Micky Tripathi feels that patients driving the innovation is the important takeaway from the big Epic news this week

Earlier this week, when Epic Systems Corporation, the Verona, Wis.-based electronic health record (EHR) vendor—a health IT giant company whose platform some 190 million patients have an electronic record on—announced its latest technology upgrade that will allow patients to grant access to their data to any provider they want, there seemed to be an overall sense of optimism amongst industry observers in terms of what this means for interoperability growth.

Micky Tripathi, Ph.D., president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, is perhaps as well-connected as anyone when it comes to health information exchange (HIE) and interoperability. Tripathi sits on the board of directors of The Sequoia Project (of which the Carequality interoperability framework is part of) and also does project management work for the CommonWell Health Alliance, which operates a health data sharing network of its own. Tripathi has been a part of countless meetings, conversations and project work within and for these organizations, with the broad goal always being to advance nationwide interoperability.

Tripathi caught up with Healthcare Informatics’ Managing Editor Rajiv Leventhal after the Epic news was released to talk about its impact, what’s specifically unique about it, and more wide-ranging interoperability issues at hand. Below are excerpts of that interview.

What were your initial takeaways from this announcement as it relates to how it could spur interoperability, given the market share presence that Epic has right now?

I think it’s a great, incremental addition to functionality and it [continues] what Epic has already been doing, which is contributing a lot to interoperability growth across the U.S. There isn’t new technology here and I don’t see it as a huge driver of interoperability. I actually think they are doing other things that are better and more important for interoperability that they don’t get as much credit for, such as pushing forward into [efforts] like Carequality, and [helping with] the connection between Carequality and CommonWell. Those things are very critical for interoperability and will have a lot more impact on interoperability compared to this [announcement].

That being said, what’s really cool about this is that Epic is very good at being practical about saying where they are now, and [realizing] what’s an important step to take forward that’s isn’t necessarily trying to be bleeding edge, but rather will offer real value to people in a practical way that they recognize. So let’s implement this in a solid way that we have high confidence people will use, it won’t break anyone’s workflows, and we’re not expecting anyone to do anything heroic. But it does push people to do things differently and think about where these types of technologies can take us.

What I think is really great about this is that Epic, along with other vendors, have always had the ability to allow portal access to a patient’s medical record information for providers who are not using that vendor’s EHR. So that part isn’t unique—the ability to say, you’re not an Epic user but here is a way to issue you credentials so you can log into a portal via a  basic browser and see a patient’s information regardless.  And the vendors all sort of have that; that’s part of the Community Connect solution in Epic.

But that’s something that’s always been provider-driven. The provider himself or herself says, ‘My patient is going to a cardiologist, I know they’re not on Epic, I am going to reach out and see if they’d be willing to get a username and password to come into this portal so they can see this important medical record for this patient who we share.’ And that’s for providers who aren’t able to partake in the interoperability that Epic already has in place, like through Care Everywhere or Carequality.

So the important innovation here is that it’s not the provider who is driving it, but the patient. So you have the patient who might be at the ED and the physician wants to know which medications the patient’s daughter might be allergic to. But the patient can’t remember all of them. Now, that patient can go into the MyChart app, get a code, give it to that provider, and he or she can log onto the Share Everywhere website, type in that code, and up will pop the medical record summary that the patient could have gotten through his or her MyChart portal, but now the provider can look at it. And the provider can also now look at it and type into a text box whatever he or she want, and that [note] will go back to the provider who has the patient’s medical record, and who can then decide if it should be incorporated into the medical record. I think that’s a really cool innovation—the patient is driving it, the patient can decide who gets it, and another provider gets access to it when he or she wouldn’t have before.

Lots more here:

https://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/interoperability/health-it-expert-tripathi-digs-deep-impact-epic-s-share-everywhere-release

For those who are not aware Epic is one of the largest provider of EHRs to practitioners in the US and along with others we are now seeing a move from centralized systems to permit patient access to their information to much more localized systems located much closer to the patient.

Of recent times the same trend is happening in the UK and now even demonstrably in Australia (see here.)

Your GP Medical Records in your hands

News / 9 June 2017

MediTracker connects your GP medial record held at this practice to your mobile device.

After hours, in an emergency, or even on holidays, MediTracker makes you and the people you care about safer.

Download the MediTracker app now for an annual fee of $5.99. Please visit meditracker.com.au for further information.

Here is the link:

https://www.ipn.com.au/gp/nsw-dee-why-dee-why-general-practice/news-events/article/your-gp-medical-records-in-your-hands/

What this approach provides is patient driven access to the current information held by their personal practitioner. Beats reviewing a collection of .pdfs held by the government which are of unknown relevance and which may be incomplete for any purpose I can think of.

By the time the myHR is made compulsory this will be failed initiative as anyone who is really interested in their healthcare will have moved on to a solution like the ones described above.

Pity about the wasted billion dollars!

David.