Health Reform Leaders Focus on Patient Access to Records as Key Barrier

A convocation of trend-setters and organizational leaders in U.S. health care was called together in Washington last Monday, June 4. The attendees advised two government organizations driving health reform--the Office of the National Coordinator at the Dept. of Health and Human Services, and the Dept. of Veteran Affairs--how to push forward one of their top goals, patient engagement.

The results of the meeting, to me, demonstrated mostly the primitive state of communications and coordinated care in the U.S. health system. In an earlier posting I discussed the sorry state of health data exchange, and Monday's patient access summit centered on the same factors of siloing and data hoarding as barriers to patient engagement.

Farzad Mostashari, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, tried to set the scope of the meeting as an incubator to suggest practical ways patients could use the data they get from health providers. (As I'll explain later, we also touched on data patients generate themselves.) His reasoning, which I endorse, is that patients currently can't do much with data except keep it somewhere and pass it to other health providers, so in order to engage them we need to provide tools for them to improve their health with this data...