Source: George Washington University
Understanding what pieces of our health information can be shared by providers under the current legal framework can be as brutally unintelligible as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Enter Health Information and the Law, a continually updated project of the Hirsh Health Law and Policy Program based at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. The project, originally developed with financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, launched in 2012 as an online resource not only for consumers, but also for healthcare providers, policymakers, administrators and other interested stakeholders. Since its launch five years ago, the project website has been visited some 900,000 times.
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A second phase, which will expand the resources on the website, just began; the principals behind the project are currently looking for additional funding. But the overall goal remains the same. As America’s health system continues to change in the aftermath of federal healthcare reform in 2010, the project, through the website, seeks to make sense of the real and perceived barriers on the collection and use of healthcare data — by breaking down and providing analysis of the federal and state laws governing the access and use of health information.
“We realized that there was a much broader need for information about sort of the rules of the road for sharing a patient’s health information,” said Jane Thorpe, associate professor and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs within GWU’s Department of Health Policy and Management, in a call with MedCity News. “So we’re trying to break down those perceived barriers and help people understand how information sharing can happen.”
The project doesn’t exactly rank states as better or worse at sharing healthcare information, but rather does comparative analyses to show how states treat different issues, and then presents those analyses through online tools.
For example, an interactive map shows the time period within which each of the 50 states requires a medical record to be provided to a patient once requested. Generally, consumers are aware of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — better known as HIPAA — but how the law applies state by state can be vexing. The map, along with a table that provides summaries and links to each state’s law, shows how a specific state’s timetable for providing health records compares to the 30-day time period mandated by HIPAA.
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During the project’s second phase, Thorpe and her colleagues plan to create more interactive online tools as well as new “decision support tools” — like, for example, a flowchart to help site visitors determine if they are a business associate and, if they are, how HIPAA law applies.
“We as as a country are trying to figure out the best way to deliver high-quality healthcare at the lowest cost with an informed and engaged consumer,” Thorpe said. “We cannot truly get to an accountable, transparent, interactive healthcare system unless we’re truly able to share information. And although the current legal framework is complex, it can be navigated.”
As the Health Information and the Law project keeps growing, it could be a helpful piece to getting patients, providers, and payers collectively engaged.