Cerner and digital health platform Validic have teamed up to enable patient-generated information to be added into Cerner's systems.
The alignment, announced March 12, will allow Cerner to integrate patient-generated fitness, clinical, wellness and nutritional data into patients' personal health portal, HealtheLife. If the patient consents, the information can also be sent to the patient's electronic health record.
"Patients would set up this connectivity via our HealtheLife portal or app [for connectivity to Cerner Millennium] or via our Cerner Wellness portal and app [for contributing the data to wellness programs]," Brian Carter, Cerner's senior director and general manager of personal health, tells FierceEMR. "The individual has control. Additionally, for Cerner Millennium connectivity, we are enabling providers to 'invite' patients to share their data in HealtheLife, so providers won't have data sent to them by patients they aren't ready to see data from. In this way, it's a double-consent model; only patients that are invited can share data, and only patients that set it up will have data shared."
To transfer the information to the EHR, Validic's platform would "normalize" disparate data sources into one standard representation.
"The great thing about platforms like Validic and Apple HealthKit is that they normalize disparate data sources into one standard representation [one from Apple, one from Validic]," Carter adds. "Our CareAware iBus platform then takes that information and transforms it into a representation that our Cerner Millennium and Cerner Wellness solutions can understand and writes it straight to the same place that we keep other clinical or wellness information. Provenance [user, device type, etc.] is preserved so that we never unintentionally commingle home data and data captured in the clinical or screening settings."
Including patient-generated health information in EHRs has shown to increase the accuracy of the data and is one aspect of patient engagement. Consumers are increasingly warming to EHRs and sharing of their records to enhance their care.
To learn more:
- read the announcement