Do Hospitals Care About Blue Button?

Jennifer Dennard has been doing a series of blog posts detailing her “Blue Button Patient Journey.” It’s a really insightful look from the patients viewpoint about how Blue Button and patient engagement with their medical records is doing.

My gut reaction when I read that post by Jennifer was that is all felt way too complex with so little value to the patient. Which of course led me to the conclusion that patients aren’t going to do this.

If patients don’t care about Blue Button, is there any reason we should believe that hospitals are going to care about Blue Button? I think we all know the answer to that question.

It would be interesting to go around the hospital and ask people what they thought of Blue Button. I have a feeling hospital employees answers would be more like a Jay Leno “Jaywalking” video than an deep explanation of Blue Button.

Of course, I’m sure that hospitals will be adopting Blue Button more and more. However, most of the people in the hospital won’t know that it’s happening. They’ll just be Blue Button enabled by default when they implement their EHR’s patient portal. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Think about how beautiful it will be to have all of your healthcare data Blue Button enabled. It could open up some really interesting possibilities. In fact, if those in the hospital knew about the data being available through Blue Button they might try and stop it from happening. Freeing healthcare data is a good thing and Blue Button is one step towards freeing the data.

Once those in the hospital realize the health data has been available to patients through blue button all along, then they’ll realize that giving patients their health data won’t cause the universe to implode. Hopefully by then we’ll have some really great applications doing beautiful things with all that blue button data.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • John,

    I’m not aware of a single Long Island hospital with ‘Blue Button’, though some have hinted that they will create such access. Given how few medical practices out here use EHR in any viable way (if at all), only the loss of MU money may help here to rectify the problem. Discharge orders here are frequently scribbled out by doctors who the patient doesn’t even know (except maybe shaking hands and getting a big bill for that), and follow-up is often limited to a quick call the next day from surgery patients.

    When you read online here and elsewhere how some major systems are aggressively pushing EHR’s and BB’s, it’s sad that some areas seem almost immune to such progress.

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