Nine Years of Progress and a New Commitment
On a cold January day high above Rockefeller Plaza a small group of technology pioneers coined the term Blue Button – denoting giving patients easy access to their own electronic health records. It’s a simple and transformative concept, central to our vision of patient-centered healthcare.
It was an honor to be there that day. And it’s an honor today, nine years later, to be making a commitment to advance the ball.
Today Manifest MedEx (MX) announced its pledge, in collaboration with Blue Shield of California, to support real-world testing of new protocols that will give patients easy electronic access to their own claims information. We join a forward-looking group of providers, health plans, employers, health IT companies, and application developers all making commitments today.
As an early adopter of new FHIR APIs for claims, Manifest MedEx can help health plans across California meet new CMS requirements and cultivate an ecosystem of innovators developing useful tools for patients.
As the first HIE joining this nation-wide collaboration, nonprofit Manifest MedEx has a unique opportunity to help develop shared resources that benefit patient care in California and beyond.
What California health leaders need to know:
- Spearheaded by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Blue Button 2.0 project was created to provide a standard set of APIs for developers, allowing patients to connect their claims data to applications, services, and research programs of their choice.
- In February 2019, CMS proposed new regulations that will require Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP plans and programs to implement, test, and monitor APIs to make patient claims and other health information available to patients through third-party applications and developers.
- The CARIN Blue Button draft implementation guide, which Manifest MedEx will be testing, supports health plans in sharing claims data with patients through third-party tools, leveraging Health Level Seven (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources