Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall

Remarkable progress has been made since I posted a recap of the first White House Roundtable on Patient Access to Health Data took place a year ago that I’ve appended below.

The desired outcomes of the White House roundtable were:

• Identify and prioritize a list of standards and best practice activities needed to advance patient and consumer access to health data
• Establish a process for addressing the priority standards activities
• Galvanize participants to engage constructively in this process

How did we do?
As was discussed in the Health Datapalooza Blue Button panel earlier this week (click here for details on progress towards broadly Blue Button adoption), even for the optimists in the group such as myself, we have been pleasantly surprised by the momentum behind the ideas discussed a year ago. The main take-aways revolved around turning Blue Button into being a two-way interactive framework. That is what has become Blue Button Plus. The Direct protocol has continued its wide acceptance. The primary missing piece is the adoption of OAuth (for single sign-on) to reduce complexity and friction in liberating data.