The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT launched two initiatives this week to increase patient access to their electronic health records via the Blue Button project. It has created a new Blue Button toolkit for EHR developers that provides recommended technical standards for sharing information with patients, as well as marketing materials to get the word out to consumers.
ONC also has initiated its own direct marketing campaign to consumers, called the "connector," which recommends that people use Blue Button to keep track of their records, check their accuracy and share the electronic information with others, such as their physicians. ONC is still populating the website before marketing it more widely. Toolkit Connector