Giving Patients A Role In Data Exchange

A pilot program at the University of Texas at Austin seeks to find the right processes for enabling patients to track who requests and receives their protected health information.

The pilot, being done under the umbrella of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, is designed to add transparency to the process of exchanging patient data. Providers have repositories within their electronic health records systems that can include signed patient consent directives for the use of their information, and the directives can be reviewed to determine what information to send. But these are closed information systems and patients usually do not know who has requested their information, what was sent and what was seen.