ONC aims to ease patient consent problem

Patient consent is one of the thornier issues in healthcare today. The benefits of patients allowing providers to share their data and those providers, in turn, playing nicely with competitors, stand to improve care both for individuals and global populations in myriad ways. But fear persists – be it of electronic health record (EHR) vendors reselling patient data, providers losing records en masse or organized crime stealing them. Indeed, patients need to feel their data is secure. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) is getting closer to launching a pilot to address that critical piece of the puzzle.

On October 5, 2011, ONC intends to kickoff the Data Segmentation Initiative (DSI) to enable “providers to share portions of an electronic medical record while not sharing others, such as information related to substance abuse treatment, which is given heightened protection under the law,” according to ONC’s HealthIT Buzz blog. “The technology could potentially be used to give patients choice over what health information is shared by providers electronically.”