Thursday, April 02, 2015

Promoting #BlueButton and ##BBonFHIR @HxRConf today

BlueButton on FHIR

[Editors Note: Disclaimer – These are my personal views and not those of the US Department of Health and Human Services or CMS]

Today I am taking a quick trip to Boston to speak at the HxRefactored Conference. This is part of the project I am on at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as Entrepreneur-in-Residence. The project involves implementing an enhanced BlueButton service for Medicare beneficiaries. This will let them connect their CMS data to applications and services that they trust. This initiative is directly in line with the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative.

Today I am speaking to Developers about our plans. This is important because it is the vibrant, entrepreneurial developer community that will create the applications that can utilize the vast trove of health data to benefit and empower consumers to maintain better health and well being.

Since the launch of BlueButton in 2010 over one million Medicare beneficiaries have downloaded their health information. At the time this was a major step forward in empowering consumers by putting their health information in their own hands. Since then the industry has moved on and the simple BlueButton text file which triggered so much innovation is being updated. The hard to process text file is giving way to structured text (json and/or xml). CMS plans to embrace this change by developing a BlueButton data service. Internally I am calling this project “BlueButton on FHIR” (#BBonFHIR – BlueButton on Fire).

Having spent the last few weeks working on a utility to parse the current CMS Blue Button file I know first hand how important it is that we create BlueButton as a RESTful API data service. It will make BlueButton data dramatically easier to ingest in to applications. I have also seen this from the developer perspective with my work at Medyear where we have built a platform to ingest BlueButton data to help members manage their health and choose what information they want to share, whom they want to share it with and even for how long they want to share it. All this becomes possible when patients can receive their health information in a computer readable form.

I will be posting the deck from today to my Slideshare account. So watch out for that.

If you are in Boston for the conference come and say hello. You will recognize me by my signature #WalkingGallery jacket.

[category News, Health]

[tag health, cloud, BlueButton, opendata]

Mark Scrimshire
Health & Cloud Technology Consultant

Mark is available for challenging assignments at the intersection of Health and Technology using Big Data, Mobile and Cloud Technologies. If you need help to move, or create, your health applications in the cloud let’s talk.
Blog: http://2.healthca.mp/1b61Q7M
email: mark@ekivemark.com
Stay up-to-date: Twitter @ekivemark

Disclosure:
I am currently HHS Entrepreneur-in-Residence working on an assignment to update BlueButton for Medicare Beneficiaries.

The views expressed on this blog are my own.

I am also CTO and Co-Founder to Medyear.com. Medyear is a powerful free tool that helps you collect, organize and securely share health information, however you want. Manage your own health records today.

Medyear: Less hassle. Better care.



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