Pilot Aims To Add Transparency To Exchange Of PHI

A pilot program at the University of Texas at Austin is looking at how to enable patient tracking of who requests and receives their protected health information (PHI), according to a Health Data Management article.

The pilot, approved by a the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology, involves the exchange of simulated Electronic Health Records (EHR) between large healthcare providers using Nationwide Health Information Network (NwHIN) Information IT standards. Each access request over the simulated NwHIN Exchange will be decided in real time based on computable policy that includes privacy metadata. Patient consent directives (PCD) will be included in the evaluation of the access request. The goal of the pilot is to present a secure, scalable solution that allows consumers to evaluate if their PCD is operating as they planned.