The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will test a personal health record program for Medicare recipients in South Carolina this month. It is CMS’ most ambitious PHR pilot project to date.
The South Carolina project will offer PHRs to 100,000 participants in Medicare’s fee-for-service program. Until now, Medicare offered PHRs only to participants in certain plans that were already making PHRs available to their members.
Instead of partnering with a health plan for the new trial, CMS selected QSSI, a small information technology company based in Gaithersburg, Md., to lead a team of contractors. The project calls for importing two years’ worth of Medicare claims data into a commercial PHR system from HealthTrio for each beneficiary who signs up for the pilot project.
The pilot project presents “a really beautiful opportunity for comparing plan-based versus externally based personal health records and the utilization and the value and the perceptions,” said Lorraine Doo, a senior policy adviser in CMS’ Office of E-Health Standards and Services, during remarks to the American Health Information Community’s Consumer Empowerment Workgroup in December.
Doo said the project will include “a pretty massive campaign [to persuade Medicare recipients to use the PHRs], working with the caregiver community and other provider partners and community partners.”
The HealthTrio PHR has been modified to meet CMS’ requirements, she said, adding that the agency is identifying the necessary modifications to enable it to export data to PHRs on a larger scale.
Doo added that the Health and Human Services Department has hired a company to evaluate the South Carolina project and earlier pilot projects so officials can compare their results. She said the agency will examine outreach and user education needs, the ease of using the PHRs, and whether patients are reviewing the PHRs or giving their health care providers access to them, among other issues.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
