Certification/MU tweaks to support patient subscriptions

This is a quick description of the minimum requirements to turn patient-mediated “transmit” into a usable system for feeding clinical data to a patient’s preferred endpoints. In my blog post last month, I described a small, incremental “trust tweak” asking ONC and CMS to converge on the Blue Button Patient Trust Bundle, so that any patient anywhere has the capability to send data to any app in the bundle.

This proposal builds on that initial tweak. I should be clear that the ideas here aren’t novel: they borrow very clearly from the Blue Button+ Direct implementation guide (which is not part of certification or MU — but aspects of it ought to be).

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Direct Project: Secure e-mail in MU2

MU2 is here, and with it: secure e-mail

As Meaningful Use 2014 EHRs come online this winter, clinicians across the country gain access the host of new features included in the MU 2014 Certification Requirements. In this post, we’ll dig into one of these features: EHR-based secure e-mail capabilities that operate using the “Direct Project” specification. (If you’re new to this world: when you hear “Direct Project,” you should think “secure e-mail for healthcare.”)

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Query Health: Interoperability for Population Data

One of our fellow travelers on the ONC’s interoperability journey is Query Health. Like the SMART platform architecture, Query Health defines a standard framework for looking at medical record data. While SMART focuses on a single-patient view of that data, Query Health is designed to ask questions about a broad swath of patients so that clinical quality trends can be observed.
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