Medicare Offers Health Tracking
On June 20th, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) unveiled an initiative to support patient involvement with their own healthcare. The agency is commencing a pilot program which will provide patients with a personal health record (PHR) accessible with the internet.
The PHR that will be offered to patients will include records from hospitalizations, medication history, health history, and doctor visits. Each patient is intended to directly utilize the record themselves and can also determine which healthcare practitioners to share the PHR with.
The pilot program will be tested with four different health plans, each with a different iteration of a PHR. The planned test will run during an eighteen month period. During that time period, CMS will monitor program effectiveness to gather data with the intent of modifying future iterations of the PHR.
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