Patient Identity Service Delivers Privacy-enhancing Patient Control of Health Information – putting the Patient at the Center of their own Health Care Using New Technologies

Piscataway, NJ – March 1, 2011 – Kantara Initiative and the eCitizen Foundation are pleased to announce the kick-off of the Patient ID Service (PIDS) project. The PIDS project is an effort to develop a new patient identity information architecture that will put patients at the center of their own health care. The project will work to help patients secure access to their doctors and medical records through health information networks like the new Nationwide Health Information Network. The project will be conducted by the eCitizen Foundation in collaboration with Kantara Initiative’sHealthcare Identity Assurance Work Group (HIA WG). Additionally, this project will benefit from strong multi-national stakeholder support within the Kantara Initiative community.

Thanks to strong support from the OpenID Foundation of Japan (OIDF-Japan) and funding from Kantara Initiative, the eCitizen Foundation is well poised for completion of Phase One (planning) of this project on behalf of the HIA WG.

Phase Two of this project will be an implementation of a patient identity service using the identity architecture developed in Phase One. This implementation will serve as an open model for all, especially in the development of Health Information and Health Benefit Exchanges and in the adoption of Electronic and Personal Health Records. Incorporation of such a patient identity service by existing and new service providers will provide patients with a necessary tool to protect their privacy and securely access their health records.

Providers will benefit as the patient identity service enables meeting “Meaningful Use” requirements such as Patient Access mandated under recent federal statutes that will be used as a basis for incentive payments to health care providers. The service will allow patients to request and receive medical records from their doctors, a key requirement for compensation under the new federal law.

In the proposed Use Case, an example patient, a student from State A away at college in State B, needs health care for a condition initially treated at home in State A. While at college, the patient needs to seek follow-up or related treatment from a provider in State B. Previous medical records will help in the new treatment and reduce overall costs for treatment. The patient will request medical records from the home-state provider, receive the records in a personal health record, and share that information with the new provider in State B.

According to John Fraser, CEO of ApeniMED (formerly MEDNET), and one of three co-chairs of the HIA WG managing this project, “This project will help patients more securely communicate with their doctors and other providers to improve patient care and to solve one of the new federal requirements for doctors. I look forward to working with my other co-Chairs, Pete Palmer of SureScripts, and Rick Moore of eHealth Ohio, to further this important service to support patients and providers using the emerging Nationwide Health Information Network.”

Shingo Yamanaka, Executive Director of OIDF-Japan, said “User Centric Personal Data Exchange is a key component of the next generation society, and we see that emerging OpenID ABC standard will be an important enabling piece of it. We very much look forward to the architecture arising from this project to feed back to the spec development process.”

Organizations who would seek to assist eCitizen, OIDF-Japan and Kantara Initiative to advance this project should contact Joni Brennan with interested inquiries.

About Kantara Initiative
http://kantarainitiative.org/

About eCitizen Foundation
http://www.ecitizenfoundation.org/2011/02/patient-identity.html

About OpenID Foundation Japan
http://openid.net/2008/02/28/openid_foundation_local_chapters/

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Media Contact
Joni Brennan
Executive Director
+1 732 226 4223
joni[at]kantarainitiative[dot]org