Blue Button Plus, Other Identifiers Can Reverse 'Information Asymmetry'

Providing patients with access to their own information and reasserting the primacy of the physician-patient relationship can reverse the "information asymmetry" that favors big healthcare corporations at the expense of patients and individual physicians, according to a post at The Health Care Blog.

Adrian Gropper, M.D., chief technical officer of the nonprofit Patient Privacy Rights writes that information asymmetry drives $3,000 in annual waste per citizen amid a health IT "certification" process that seems designed to drive small vendors and open-source software out of the market.

Even analytics-fueled population health management, however, doesn't have to increase information asymmetry when used with patient involvement in efforts such as Blue Button Plus and standards for developing secure patient identifiers, he writes.