Children's Hospital Boston Expands Patient Record PortalChildren's Hospital Boston Expands Patient Record Portal

Children's Hospital Boston is expanding the clinical data that's available to patients and clinicians via its secure Web-based patient portal.

The hospital is working with the Pediatric Physicians' Organization at Children's Hospital Boston, which is its network of affiliated physicians, as well as with EMR vendor eClinicalWorks to provide patients and doctors with access to clinical data from sources outside the hospital.

Data is currently fed to patients' health records from Children Hospital's internal Cerner electronic medical record system. With the new system, data will also be added to patients' records from eClinicalWorks EMR systems, which is the EMR platform used by the hundreds of Boston-area pediatricians and pediatric specialty-care doctors, who treat Children's Hospital patients on an out-patient basis.

Patients' personally controlled health records are accessible through Children's secure, Web-based MyChildren's patient portal. Individuals can grant permission to institutions, clinicians, researchers, and other users of medical information to access this data.

By combining patient data from the Cerner EMR system that the hospital uses internally with data from the EMR systems used by ambulatory-care clinicians, patients and their healthcare providers will have access to more comprehensive and complete clinical information about the patient, said Children's CIO Dr. Dan Nigrin.

"Data will be automatically fed from the Children's Cerner EMR into the patient's personally controlled health record, and data from the EMRs of our physician organization will also be automatically fed to the patient records," he says. The data won't be "pulled," but rather it will be automatically fed and then stored in Indivo, which is Children's Hospital's open source, internally developed architecture for integrating data from multiple sources.

Indivo is also the technology behind the personal health record system being deployed by Dossia consortium's members to their employees. Dossia is a group of employers, including Wal-Mart and Intel, who are funding Web-based personalized health records for workers.

"We're pushing new boundaries," said Nigrin about the "raw data," such as lab results, that will be fed into the personally controlled health records from the multiple EMR sources and points of care. "This is a brave new world," Nigrin adds.

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