Health IT, Patient Engagement, Policy

Secrets to PHR success: Q&A with the brains behind the Blue Button

How do you launch a massively successful personal health records project with thousands happy users […]

How do you launch a massively successful personal health records project with thousands happy users and heaps of praise?

1. Make sure you have 1 million users when you launch
2. Have the president of the United States announce it

Dr. Peter Levin shared his simple tips for success at ENGAGE today. From May 2009 until March 2013, Levin was Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs where he was the designated lead for health record modernization. He led the Blue Button Personal Health Record (PHR) project as well as the OSEHRA.org project.

Levin is now vice chairman of the board and managing director of Poliwogg Holdings, Inc., the company announced today. Poliwogg is a leader in accredited investor crowdfunding for the healthcare industry.

Bob Keaveney, the editorial director pf Physicians Practice, talked with Levin and drew out some advice that was more relevant to average entrepreneurs and HIT companies. Here are the best questions from the conversation.

Question: Why did the VA succeed where other companies — Microsoft, Google – have failed with personal health records?

“It is amazingly simple to use. With the push of a blue button, you could get everything you know about your health. There was none of the latent discomfort that you were sharing information with these big companies that have nothing to do with your health.

“Plus no one else was trying to take all the other records and make them interoperable. You can keep them separate if you want, bu most people would like to have it in one place.”

Q: Why not just enforce an Obamacare-like set of EHR standards to solve the interoperability problem?

Levin
: “Let’s not go down that awful road. The short answer is to abstract out the name space and don’t worry about direct integration. We don’t need to agree on each and every element, we just need to agree on the higher level terms.

“The easy way is to create a data broker and we will be the translation service between you.

“I am against waiting for standards when you have a societal crisis. People are dying waiting for health records and for access to care. This is transcendental good we are doing here.”

Q: When will commercial payers implement the Blue Button?

Levin: “The administration is making sure the startup community has tremendous access to the data and the protocols and to Todd himself. They are lifting up the last bastion of resistance to enterprise software, which is the medical practice.

“I hope that the VA is not the first one to come up with a more connected and more portable version of the Blue Button. When the VA doesn’t have the best version any more, that means private companies have leapfrogged ahead. Then we’ll be able to say to the VA, ‘Look at the revolution you instigated, now you have to keep up.'”

Q: In phase 3 or 4 when it becomes a two-way button, will vets be able to correct errors in the medical record?

Levin:
“We struggled with this. We debated if we had a minimally viable product or not. Should we not release it because it didn’t have really important things like fixing errors? We decided to release it anyway. The best approach is to talk to your doctor about problems in your records and start there.”

Veronica Combs

Veronica is an independent journalist and communications strategist. For more than 10 years, she has covered health and healthcare with a focus on innovation and patient engagement. Most recently she managed strategic partnerships and communications for AIR Louisville, a digital health project focused on asthma. The team recruited 7 employer partners, enrolled 1,100 participants and collected more than 250,000 data points about rescue inhaler use. Veronica has worked for startups for almost 20 years doing everything from launching blogs, newsletters and patient communities to recruiting speakers, moderating panel conversations and developing new products. You can reach her on Twitter @vmcombs.

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