Why the VA's Blue Button Could Be a Big Deal
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, September 2 2010
The Department of Veterans Affairs is rolling out something called the "Blue Button" that's both drop-dead simple and potentially powerful when it comes managing the health of America's soldiers and vets.
The button (really more slate colored than pure blue, but no matter) is meant to be sprinkled across the network of health sites that vets might use. Click on it, and it pulls up the vet's electronic medial record, in ASCII text file. Here's a sample. That file is now, of course, portable, and can be used in a number of different health apps, like, say, Google Health.
The Blue Button is of a piece with the Obama administration's push to use electronic health records (EHRs) to bridge the gap in care between when servicemembers are actively serving and when they retire -- including, for course, the new generation of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama included billions in the stimulus in the hopes of kicking America towards EHRs, quickly. Proving that they can work in the military context would be a coup on those grounds. More that that, managing to harmonize the work of the multiple agencies involved in military health care would be validation for what Obama has talked about as his vision for using technology to reinvent how American government serves its citizens. All that in one big blue button.
Here's more on the VA Blue Button project, being done in collaboration with the Defense Department and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.