(Editor’s Note: This exclusive post is from Christina Thielst, one of our distinguished Advisory Board members. Christina is a hospital administrator,consultant, educator and author who has experienced the evolution of healthcare over the last 30 years. Thanks for this exclusive post, Christina!)
The National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) has convened a Technical Expert Panel (TEP) to provide input on how to successfully implement Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD). This project, being conducted on behalf of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), will identify use cases and best practices for sharing information between patients and providers and integrating PGHD into clinical workflows. The final outcome of the project will include an evidence-based report that will support the HIT Policy Committee Meaningful Use Workgroup in developing recommendations for Stage 3 Meaningful Use and inform ONC and the healthcare community on PGHD-related issues that go beyond Meaningful Use.
The first phase of the project recently generated an environmental scan of existing practices which include those with the most value:
- Safety (Medications, allergies, etc)
- Treatment plan (info requested by providers, recent changes, etc)
- New patient concern (unexpected or worsening of symptoms, deemed important by the individual patient, etc)
- Administrative and important (high impact on care processes, caregivers/team, communication preferences)
The next phase will include development of a report on how practices can prepare, prioritize information, and incorporate PGHD into their practice, and will focus on emerging opportunities and issues beyond Meaningful Use. For those of you who may want to submit or recommend a case study for consideration, consider joining the Consumer Consortium on eHealth and watch for the next series of calls for proposals
Other NeHC consumer engagement efforts have included development of the NeHC Patient Engagement Framework in collaboration with many stakeholders, and promotion of the NeHC Consumer eHealth Readiness Tool (CeRT) – a business intelligence tool mapped to the Patient Engagement Framework and Meaningful Use. Each of these are tremendous resources for healthcare professionals who desire more effective consumer, patient and family engagement by their organization.
image: PGHD/shutterstock