Giving patients the ability to electronically share their medical records with physicians and caregivers that don’t have interoperable electronic health records platforms is the aim of Epic Systems Corp.’s new Share Everywhere mobile app. Announced last week, Share Everywhere allows patients with a MyChart app on their smartphone to send healthcare providers a link and access code to their electronic medical record. MyChart is Epic’s patient portal that contains a patient’s medical record.
Healthcare providers accessing MyChart can see a summary of the patient’s health records and drill down to see specific patient data such as allergies and medications the patient is currently taking. Providers can also electronically send a progress note to the patient’s primary healthcare provider for continuity of care. Providers, however, will not be able to download any information from a patient’s medical records to their own workflows through Share Everywhere.
“Empowering patients to electronically share medical records with healthcare providers removes the paper process,” says Epic vice president of access applications Sean Bina. “Prior to interoperability patients either carried charts or faxed relevant information from their medical records to providers. Share Everywhere makes that data more portable for the patient.”
Bina says enabling patients to provide others access to their medical records can improve the care received when a healthcare provider does not have an interoperable electronic health records platform or any medical records platform at all, such as a mental health provider, caregiver at a nursing facility or school nurse. The ability for patients to provide access to their medical records can also prove helpful when seeking treatment out of the country, Bina adds.
Epic plans to include Share Everywhere in a November update to MyChart users at no cost. 68 million patients have MyChart accounts, Epic says.
Epic considers Share Everywhere an extension of Care Everywhere, Epic’s interoperability platform. Care Everywhere facilitates the exchange of two million patient records daily, 25% of which are exchanged between Epic and non-Epic sites, Epic says. In addition, 100% of Epic’s health system customers are interoperable with each other, other electronic health records systems, government organizations and other national networks, the company says. By launching Share Everywhere, Epic solved the problem of enabling patients to share their medical records with providers not using interoperable medical records platforms, Bina says.
Epic is not the only electronic health records vendor enabling patients to give healthcare providers access to their medical records. The Allscripts FollowMyHealth patient portal allows patients to grant providers access to their medical records, add notes and send information to any provider through secure systems. Data sharing tools include the direct standard, a data standard that allows participants to send authenticated, encrypted health information directly to recipients online via the web and e-mail and by direct fax.
“The patient has the ability to grant access to their FollowMyHealth account to any provider or caregiver, which is audited at all times so the patient knows who is accessing their record,” says Allscripts senior vice president of health systems and population health solutions management Rich Berner. “The patient is in full control and able to rescind access to his FollowMyHealth account at any time.”
Like Epic, Allscripts has also developed an interoperable platform. Allscripts CareInMotion provides a single patient record across documents originating from any electronic health record.
“Without a solution like this, physicians waste precious time with patients, and will miss vital clinical information because it is buried in a document that was simply shared and not truly incorporated into the physicians’ workflow,” Berner says.
Favorite