ONC Unveils Blue Button Campaign, Toolkit During Health IT Week

On Monday, National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo kicked off National Health IT Week by announcing an upcoming Blue Button campaign that will focus on consumers' access to their personal health data, FierceHealthIT reports (Dvorak, FierceHealthIT, 9/15).  In 2010, the Department of Veterans Affairs launched the Blue Button tool to help veterans access and exchange their personal health data in a standard, consistent manner. Since then, other private and federal agencies have implemented the tool (iHealthBeat, 9/2).

As part of the Blue Button campaign, ONC released a new Blue Button Toolkit, Health Data Management reports.  The toolkit is designed to help organizations -- including health information exchanges, immunization registries, labs and pharmacies -- improve access to consumers' personal health data. It includes information about:

• Marketing materials and strategies; and
• Technical guidelines for sharing patient data (Slabodkin, Health Data Management, 9/16).

In addition, the toolkit updated and replaced the Blue Button Implementation Guide, which ONC expects to continue to update as it adopts new standards.

The implementation guide now includes:
A portfolio of national standards to increase access to electronic health records;
Alternative technical procedures for exchanging consumer information, including application programming interfaces, secure attachments and Web services...