It’s about to get a lot easier for patients in the U.S. to access their own medical records.
Healthcare software vendor Epic Systems on Thursday announced that individuals will be able to securely release their health data to different apps they choose to use, meaning they will have more direct control over their medical information than ever before.
For instance, if patients are using a health coaching app or an app that reminds them to take their medicine, they can choose to import their records directly into those platforms. All they need are the credentials they use to sign into Epic.
This seemingly simple feat is a major technological leap for the healthcare sector, and it reflects the beginning of a new standard of data-sharing practices that are set to take shape across the nation.
Epic is one of the organizations that has been helping the federal government establish the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA. It launched in December and aims to iron out both the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data at scale.
Healthcare data in the U.S. has historically been siloed and difficult to move around. Clinics, hospitals and health systems can store their information in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors, and there hasn’t been a trusted nationwide mechanism in place for transporting it securely. This means if a patient moves to a different state or visits a new hospital, their medical records may not always follow them.
Several companies and information exchange networks have cropped up in the private sector to try and address this problem, but none of them have managed to completely resolve it on their own. TEFCA was designed to help bring all these different actors together.
TEFCA falls under the purview of an office in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Patients can think about TEFCA as they think about using their cellphone, said Micky Tripathi, assistant secretary for technology policy and national coordinator for health information technology at HHS.
If one person uses Verizon as their phone carrier, a second person uses AT&T and a third person uses T-Mobile, they are all still able to call and text one another. The same playbook applies to TEFCA.
“The idea was, ‘We really ought to just have that user experience that wherever I am, whichever system I’m using, I know that it’ll connect to every other network, whichever network I’m on,’” Tripathi told CNBC in an interview.
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