Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 6.3
Patients Can Upload Clinical Data in a CCD or the Blue Button Format into RelayHealth
from their Provider's EHR
email, making appointments and viewing test results. In general patients don't input
their own clinical data into a portal. Some portals now include the capability for a
patient to upload their clinical data in the CCD format from their provider's EHR
into their PHR. Alternately, some PHRs allow veterans to use the Blue Button [
7
] to
upload their clinical data from the VA's VistA EHR. The Blue Button can be posted
by any web site that wants to offer veterans this same capability. Both of these
options are illustrated in Fig.
6.3
.
RelayHealth
was founded in 1999 as Healinx by Assaf Morag, another HBOC
(now McKesson Provider Technologies) employee to leave to start a company.
Assaf first got me thinking about the role of the Internet in linking patients with their
care providers. The name was later changed to RelayHealth and it was subsequently
acquired by McKesson Provider Technologies. Today their patient portal serves
over 2,000,000 activated patients and is interfaced to all of the major health enter-
prise systems. A health system typically provides RelayHealth's health information
exchange capabilities for use by its employed providers or those that commonly
refer patients to the health system. RelayHealth's platform enables clinical integra-
tion of data (HL7, CCD, etc.) between systems, and also includes a frontend portal
for those users who do not have an EMR. RelayHealth's platform also supports the
VA's Blue Button format. In 2011 RelayHealth won the Blue Button Challenge (and
$50,000 which it donated to charity) by being the first vendor to support the Blue
Button. If an EMR vendor cannot send or receive a CCD, they can use the Blue
Button format to share data, even for non-veterans. (Fig.
6.3
)
