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A big part of our health reform agenda
in Vermont is to enable patients
to manage their own health and
be much more engaged in their own health.
Blue Button is going to enable patients
and consumers to have a way to
interact with their own health care
in a completely different way
by making that data liquid and available
- not just as a visit summary,
but actually as data that can be
imported to other data systems,
whether they're Health 2.0 applications,
personal health records,
or things that we don't even know what they are yet,
but that data liquidity I think is key to what we're trying to
do overall in health information exchange.
One of the most surprising things about
the work that we've been doing in Vermont
is how rapidly physicians and other
health care providers have gone from
being fairly resistant to the idea of implementing EHRs
and not really even understanding
why you'd do exchange, to being so interested
in doing it, at the present moment we're oversubscribed
- we can't get practices hooked up to our exchange
and enrolled in our medical home project quickly enough.
I think the advice that I would give to other states
for considering thinking about Blue Button is to move forward.
Even if you can't do an implementation instantaneously,
just starting to think about
and organize around the idea of enabling the patients to
access their data from whatever data source the state chooses
to place the Blue Button in,
is in and of itself a catalyzing force.
We have an opportunity at the moment to say,
we're not going to keep doing health care the way that we've
been doing it in the past, because we know that
that's a failure. We have the opportunity to say,
"We're going to do things differently and we're going
to use technology to help us do that differently."
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