Where the Blue Button Initiative fits into EHRs

The Blue Button Initiative has been touted as a powerful way for veterans to download a summary of their health records from their My HealtheVet account. Last August, President Obama announced this capability of the VA system, bringing national attention to it. The simple “Blue Button” feature allows a simple text download of information from the VA system’s Personal Health Record (PHR) – part of the HHS effort to “liberate data” from otherwise inaccessible sources. It was the result of a collaborative effort between the VA, CMS, the Department of Defense, along with the Markle Foundation’s Consumer Engagement Workgroup.

And now, the VA is announcing a Blue Button Prize Competition, hoping to encourage innovators to build PHRs that have Blue Button capability, and can install that PHR on 25,000 physician websites across the U.S...

One of the “fatal flaws” of the Blue Button data format is that it is a simple, untagged text file – the output of such a file can be seen here. That means that the data is not easily readable by computers – it is not a tagged XML file, and thus very hard for a machine to read. The VA has talked about tagging their data so that it can be parsed into more-generalizable XML files, but that has not yet occurred....