Cerner and TPP show NHS Blue Button

The NHS looks set to copy the hugely successful US Blue Button initiative, which enables patients to very easily download their electronic records by pressing an eponymous online blue button.

EHealth Insider can exclusively reveal that the NHS Commissioning Board will demonstrate a UK implementation of Blue Button this week.

The pilot, involving patient downloads of records from TPP for primary care and Cerner for secondary care, will be showcased at this week’s NHS Innovation Expo.

Both Cerner and TPP were asked by the NHS CB and the Health and Social Care Information Centre to open up their application provider interfaces to enable mobile health specialist, Humetrix, to create the demonstration using its cloud-based iBlueButton product.

Dr Bettina Experton, chief executive of Humetrix, told EHI: “We were invited by Mark Davies of the Health and Social Care Information Centre to demonstrate iBlueButton to create a Blue Button for the English NHS.

“From TPP we are pulling a live record and from Cerner the secondary care data, by working with their APIs. In the case of Cerner, the data is a discharge summary from its Millennium electronic medical record.”

EHI saw a demo version running on a tablet last week at the HIMSS 2013 conference in New Orleans, badged as NHS Croydon.

It combined primary and secondary care data into a simple combined record. Once a download from a particular provider has been set up by a patient, further additions can be set to be automatically fetched.

Plans for Blue Button in the English NHS are unknown but the approach would appear to offer an attractive short-cut to achieving the government’s goal for all patients to have access to their GP electronic patient record by 2015.

The government has said it will run a consultation this summer on giving patients access to further records at a later date.

Blue Button, together with the slogan ‘Download my Data’, was introduced by the US Veterans Association beginning 2010.

It has since been adopted by a range of public and private healthcare providers, including the Department of Defence, United, Aetna and Kaiser. Some 70m US citizens now have access to their records through Blue Button.

The initiative grew out of a idea at a 2010 Markle Foundation Conference, at which it was proposed as a very simple way to enable patients to download and share their medical records. Data is downloaded in a very simple unstructured ASCII format, which is unstructured but easily readable.

In August 2012, the millionth download was reached, and the initiative has even won plaudits from President Barack Obama.

In January 2013, the VA announced plans to significantly expand Blue Button by adding: demographics, active problems lists, discharge summaries, progress notes, lab results, vitals and readings, pathology reports, radiology reports and EKG reports.

Also added is a new structured VA Continuity of Care Document. The VA CCD is a feature that contains a summary of the Veteran’s essential health and medical care information in an XML file format.

Last week at the HIMSS 2013 trade show, US National health IT boss, Dr Farzad Mostashari announced that Blue Button would be further “plussed up”, with more structured XML data developed, as part of efforts to increase interoperability between healthcare providers.