App Helps Patients Track Care

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IBlueButton Lets Patients Access Medical Records on a Smartphone

By 

MELINDA BECK

Dec. 16, 2013 7:37 p.m. ET

Farzad Mostashari loves to tell the story of the app that saved Thanksgiving.

His parents were visiting for the holiday last year. Relaxing after dinner, Dr. Mostashari, then President Obama's national coordinator for health-information technology, signed them up for a new app called iBlueButton that lets people access their Medicare records via smartphone.

The next morning, his father complained of severe eye pain. "I thought, 'It's the Friday after Thanksgiving. We'll be spending the whole day in the ER,'" Dr. Mostashari recalls. Then he remembered iBlueButton, which showed that a cataract surgeon had diagnosed a dry-eye condition, enabling Dr. Mostashari to get his dad the appropriate medication before noon.

Farzad Mostashari, President Obama's former health-information technology coordinator, backed iBlueButton. Bobby Gladd

Giving patients access to their own medical records is a key goal of health reformers. In an initiative known as Blue Button, the Obama administration has pressed doctors, hospitals, government agencies and businesses that hold patient data to make it available to download. And the government has sponsored contests to encourage tech entrepreneurs to design apps and other tools to make the data easier for patients to use.

Last year, Humetrix of Del Mar, Calif., won first place in the Blue Button Mash Up Challenge with iBlueButton, which lets patients access their medical records via Apple or Android phones and displays them in reader-friendly form.

For now, iBlueButton only works with records from Medicare, the Veterans Administration, Tricare and a few private insurers, but more records will be accessible through it next year.

Medicare beneficiaries can already set up a password-protected account at MyMedicare.gov and view three years of claims filed on their behalf, but the text file is unwieldy and typically hundreds of pages long.

IBlueButton not only makes that same data accessible on a mobile device, it clearly displays every diagnosis; every doctor, hospital and ER visit; and every lab test, X-ray and prescription, including when and where it was filled. Links to other sources let patients, relatives or caregivers look up each condition and drug.

iBlueButton Humetrix

IBlueButton also lets patients send their Medicare records to doctors who have downloaded their version of the program, iBlueButton Professional.

"If a patient can't speak, he can simply show the information on his phone to the people in the ER," says Bettina Experton, an internist who founded Humetrix in 1998.

Being able to review every Medicare claim also lets patients or family members spot errors or fraudulent bills. One iBlueButton user noticed his records showed he'd had a lung transplant. It turned out the radiologist had made a coding error.

IBlueButton doesn't store the user data itself. The information is downloaded from MyMedicare.gov to the phone, and when users need to update it, they download it anew.

The first download of any Blue Button health record is free, along with the app itself. Users pay Humetrix $1.99 for five subsequent downloads or $7.99 for 25. They also get a download credit each time they share their record with a health-care provider. Downloads of Veterans Administration records are free to U.S. veterans. (IBlueButton Professional has a one-time cost of $49.99 and is available only for iPads, but it allows doctors to maintain an unlimited number of patient files.)

Aetna Inc. and McKesson Corp.'s RelayHealth also let patients view their claims information via iBlueButton, but only in PDF form because they haven't yet adopted the technical standards iBlueButton needs to reformat the data.

To date, only about 15,000 people have downloaded the iBlueButton app, according to Humetrix. But 44% of them have used the app repeatedly—in all some 100,000 times in the last 12 months. The company expects many more to do so as more health records become available and awareness spreads.

Starting next year, hospitals and doctors must make their electronic-medical records available to patients to "view, download and transmit" to qualify for bonus Medicare payments. The new iBlueButton 5.0 release coming in January will be able to access and display those records as it does Medicare claims.

Last month, Humetrix unveiled a new app that lets paramedics access, via a QR code, critical information from a user's phone in case he is incapacitated. For $19.99 a year, the app will also send an email alert and location information to the user's emergency contacts.

Also next year, the Obama administration plans to launch a website called Blue Button Connector that will list all the agencies, businesses, insurers and other entities that let people access their health data, as well as the growing variety of tools and apps that make doing so easier.

Several other companies—including GenieMD, NoMoreClipboard.com and Microsoft HealthVault—have designed mobile apps that let users create their own personal health profiles, track their conditions and incorporate data from Blue Button records as it becomes available.

"As more of health data becomes digital, there is an enormous opportunity for other new players in the market to help you—and your family and loved ones—manage that data, get insights from it, store it, share it and make it really useful to you," Dr. Mostashari says.

Write to Melinda Beck at HealthJournal@wsj.com