VA's Blue Button Now At 1 Million Users, Aims At 100 Million Soon

Two years ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs' Blue Button project started with the idea that VA could improve veterans' health outcomes by giving them something they'd been clamoring for: easy access to their own health records that had theretofore been locked up in VA's data systems and visible only to health care providers.

But VA says more than 1 million users have now signed up for Blue Button, which now extends far beyond the walls of VA. The Defense Department and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have adopted VA's personal health record (PHR) framework, as have several of the large insurance companies that serve civilian federal employees.

Last month, in its first round of Presidential Innovation Fellowships, the Obama Administration brought aboard three technologists who want to help nationalize Blue Button, one of only five projects the White House settled on.