Melissa Crawford is a mother from Concord, NH.  Her two year old daughter, Ava, has a congenital heart defect and was recently diagnosed with epilepsy.  Melissa loves Ava’s physician’s patient portal since it allows her to easily book appointments and refill Ava’s medications online.  But when Ava’s pediatrician needed medical records from Ava’s five specialists, the various patient portals did not provide all the health information the doctor needed.  Melissa set off on a stressful and complicated journey to gather the information from the five specialists in time for Ava’s appointment with her pediatrician.

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The ONC Patient Engagement (PE) Playbook was created by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to help healthcare professionals use health information technology (health IT) to provide better care to patients. The PE Playbook focuses specifically on electronic health record (EHR) patient portals, which allow both patients and healthcare teams, concurrent with patients’ privacy preferences, to easily access patient health information — which may lead to increased benefits for healthcare,

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To help individuals manage their health, beginning in 2011, the Medicare and Medicaid Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Programs called on health care providers to enable patients to electronically view, download, and transmit their health information to a destination of the patient’s choice. In 2015, the Shared Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap [PDF – 2.6 MB] reaffirmed this objective.

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The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released a HIPAA fact sheet earlier this year reinforcing patients’ right to access their health information and clarifying, among other things, that patients may be charged only limited fees for copies of their health information.  Many people are not fully aware of their right to access their own medical records under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), including the right to access an electronic copy when their health information is stored electronically.

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Clinicians and other health care providers practice medicine with the noble goal of improving patient outcomes. The day-to-day considerations in treating patients are complex, which is where technology can be leveraged to streamline and better inform the patient-provider interaction.

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