The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has launched a meaningful consent website that aims to help healthcare providers engage patients in choosing how they want their electronic patient health information shared.
The website includes laws, policies, and issues related to health information exchange (HIE) as well as strategies and tools that can be used to engage and educate patients. It also has background on Meaningful Consent, lessons learned, videos, and customizable tools from the eConsent pilot project that was completed by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in March of 2013.
“As patients become more engaged in their health care, it’s vitally important that they understand more about various aspects of their choices when it relates to sharing their health in the electronic health information exchange environment” stated Joy Pritts, chief privacy officer of the ONC.
The website comes out of 2011 recommendations from ONC’s Health Information Technology Policy Committee (HITPC). The policy called on ONC to inform, collect, and evaluate the information patients need to make an informed choice about electronic exchange of their health information
