Electronic Health Record (EHR) technology should enable a provider to deliver patients with timely access to their health information as it is input in the EHR. The data may be accessible in an online patient portal or a personal health record (PHR).
Medicaid Promoting Interoperability Objective and Calculation
The objective is to promote patient awareness and engagement with their clinical data in the interest of creating greater engagement and, in turn, better outcomes.
Measure:
- More than 5% of unique patients seen by the EP during the EHR reporting period (or their authorized representatives) view, download, or transmit his or her health information to a third party or access their information or access it through use of an API.
Denominator for calculation: Number of unique patients seen by the provider in the reporting period.
Numerator for calculation: The number of unique patients (or their authorized representatives) in the denominator who have viewed online, downloaded, or transmitted to a third party the patient’s health information OR who have accessed their health information through the use of an application programming interface (API).
EXCLUSIONS:
- An EP neither orders nor creates any of the information listed for inclusion as part of the measures; or,
- An EP that conducts 50 percent or more of his or her patient encounters in a county that does not have 50 percent or more of its housing units with 4Mbps broadband availability according to the latest information available from the FCC on the first day of the EHR reporting period may exclude only the second measure.
Promoting Interoperability Discussion
One method for a patient to count toward the utilization measure involves the use of any of the View, Download, or Transmit links in RevolutionPHR. This can be accomplished by the patient in two places in RevolutionPHR:
- The “About Me” section. See Example
- The "Appointment" section. See Example
The second method for a patient to count toward the utilization measure is for them to access their clinical information through RevolutionEHR’s third party API. Most commonly, this would involve the patient engaging with an application on a mobile device and that application interfacing with RevolutionEHR. RevolutionEHR makes this API automatically available, but a third party or patient cannot access data without a number of security steps. Additional information on this method can be found here: Patient Data Access by Third Party API
Conclusion
Meeting this utilization/actual use measure is expected to be a significant challenge as it requires a proactive effort by the provider/practice to encourage PHR utilization by patients.