They've Got an App for That

There's a law requiring providers of federal funded drug and alcohol treatment services to obtain a patient's consent before disclosing their medical records to another provider or to a health information exchange. Does your electronic health record enable you to segregate those records, store those patient consent directives and remind you that you need to obtain patient consent to move patient-constrained medical information?

There's another federal law that requires providers to honor a patient's request to withhold sending to his insurance company that portion of his record for care and treatments paid for by the patient out-of-pocket. Can your EHR help you comply with that law?

Forget about the law for a minute. What if your patient simply asks you to not disclose her diagnosis of depression in an otherwise patient-approved exchange of records with a specialist? Can your EHR parse out the code for that sensitive diagnosis from the rest of your electronic care summary?

If you're like most doctors and hospitals, the answer to all of the above questions is: no.

The Veterans Affairs Department demonstrated at the Health Information and Management Systems Society convention this week a new patient privacy consent management technology, that could help providers say “yes” to all of these questions. The software has been designed to work with the federal government's open source Connect project, which is billed as a common on-ramp to the nationwide health information exchange.