Florida to launch Medicaid personal health record
By Brian Robinson
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Florida will launch in early December the first stage of a program that will eventually allow all 2.6 million Medicaid patients in the state to have their own Web-based personal health record, and let physicians see other providers’ claims data.
The state’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) hopes this will help boost the overall health of Medicaid users by giving patients the ability to more closely track such things as doctor visits, immunization shots, medications and procedures performed. They’ll also have access to a large library of health topics that will be integrated with the health record.
On their side, in the second phase of the program that will begin in the spring of 2010, doctors will get a much broader view of their Medicaid patients’ status by being able to see what treatments and medications they’ve been given through other providers.
The new program is the culmination of an effort that began with a 2007 pilot program in Leon County. AHCA officials said late last year that they wanted to take the lessons learned in that pilot to expand the program statewide.
AHCA will team with community organizations and other government organizations around the state that allow access to their computers in order to educate Medicaid recipients about the new health records, said Tiffany Vause, a AHCA spokesperson.
AHCA will also pull quarterly data to check regularly on how well the new personal health record – called My Florida Health eBook and My Florida eBaby Book – is being used, and how to better get information out to patients, she said.
The agency is partnering with Availity LLC, a health information network provider, health IT and services company HealthTrio LLC, and Healthwise, which provides health information, to power the new program.
It will all come at no expense to Florida taxpayers, AHCA said.
