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VA's My Health-e-Vet: A Ruse By Any Other Name...
by Jim Strickland
It hardly seems that it was 5 years ago that your Department of Veterans Affairs invited me to Washington, DC. That July in 2005 was a memorable trip. One of the days I was there, 07/07/2005 was the day that terrorism struck London and then Washington went into a very nervous sort of watchfulness. I’m not used to Blackhawks flying low overhead and suited up serious looking guys with locked and loaded automatic weapons on the Metro with me.
They paid for the journey and I met a lot of very nice people. It was exciting, I came away impressed and thankfully, uninjured.
I was there to be interviewed by VA consultants and employees, along with many others, about the new My HealtheVet project. I was then a “Rising Star” VA volunteer at my clinic and hospital and as a known computer and Internet geek, it seemed that my opinion about Evet may have some merit.
The Evet project was complex but simple. It was to be a portal to health care information with a focus on veterans health. The project was destined to allow properly registered veterans to see their medicines and health records and to have some degree of interaction with their health care providers.
I recall that we volunteers who were interviewed all wanted similar things. We’d like to see our medical records (labs, x-ray reports, clinic notes by physicians, etc.), have access to a calendar to allow appointment scheduling and a way to communicate with a provider rather than making telephone calls to the antiquated and generally useless VA phone system. Everyone we met seemed enthused by all this.
We were promised prescription refills. That other stuff we wanted would come soon, we were told.
I questioned that. The system we used to refill prescriptions was working well. Pharmacists are the most available health care professionals in the VA system, we could mail in refill requests and even the clunky telephone system seemed to work pretty well for refills.
Did we need another way to refill our prescriptions? Someone thought so and so we got it.
In 2007 - 2008 or so we were promised that if we became “authenticated” (in-person authentication also known as IPA) that we’d have access to our medical records soon. Authentication...IPA...meant going to your facility with proper ID and being entered into the system once you proved that you were you. Fair enough.
In 2009 we were told that we would soon have secure communications to some providers. I believe that meant we might get the email addresses of a couple of flunkies at the clinic who wouldn’t correctly respond to us...sort of like those call centers at the VA toll free number.
Whatever it was, it didn’t happen.
I heard rumors about budget cuts and one ranking VA employee told me that the Evet budget has been slashed to practically nothing. You can’t fight a 10-year war and care for all those TBI & PTSD troops and have a nice web program simultaneously I suppose.
I understood that. OK, but what’s on the horizon? I was once enthused about this effort and until today, I remained enthused. This has potential.
In 2009 I even tried to interview a couple of upper crusty sorts of managers of the Evet program. I had to fight the bureaucracy, talk to the VA PR types (who I make nervous) and after promises that I wanted to tell the story of the positive side of things,
I had senior management permission to proceed with the interviews.
I set up a time and was cancelled. OK, stuff happens, no big deal. Then I was stood up again. And again. I never had the courtesy of a simple, “We won’t speak with you Strickland.”
Now I know why.
The My HealtheVet project died in 2010. It became apparent that it’s rolled over and gasped its last and final breath when they announced the “Blue Button” program with fanfare.
The VA web site touts, “Download Your MyHealtheVet Personal Health Record. On August 2, 2010, President Obama announced the “Blue Button” capability that allows Veterans to download their personal health information from their MyHealtheVet account.”
Blue Button Initiative
On August 2, 2010, President Obama announced the “Blue Button” capability that allows Veterans to download their personal health information from their MyHealtheVet account. VA developed the Blue Button in collaboration with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Department of Defense, along with the Markle Foundation's Consumer Engagement Workgroup.
The MyHealtheVet Personal Health Record (PHR) is comprised of self-entered health metrics (blood pressure, weight, heart rate, etc.), emergency contact information, test results, family health history, military health history, and other health related information. The Blue Button extract that Veterans can download is a so-called “ASCII text file”, the easiest and simplest electronic text format (see a sample Blue Button file).
Blue Button PHRs can be printed, or saved on computers and portable storage devices. Having control of this information enables Veterans to share this data with health care providers, caregivers, or people they trust.
On August 29, 2010, VA will make the Blue Button available on our website. Throughout the month of September Veterans can login to their MyHealtheVet account and try out the Blue Button. In early October, VA and CMS will officially roll-out the Blue Button download feature at the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
Additionally, the Markle Foundation has issued a Developer Challenge. VA looks forward to the innovative platforms, apps, and widgets that will result from this exciting competition. For more information, visit the Blue Button Challenge website or the CMS Blue Button website.
At first glance, that sounds pretty good. At long last we can see our personal health information from our VA medical records, right?
Well, no...not exactly.
Read between the lines. Your VA hopes you aren’t very good at that task. For example, “With My HealtheVet, America’s Veterans can access trusted, secure, and current health and benefits information as well as record and store important health and military history information at their convenience.”
OK...on Evet you can access good health information. You can do the same thing at maybe 10,000 other web sites run by the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Texas Heart Institute, The American Cancer Society and so on. They’re free and updated regularly.
Then, using Evet you can collect and record and store important stuff about yourself. Best of all, you can do it at your convenience.
That’s just what I’ve been waiting for all these years. Finally, VA has created for me a space on the VA Internet site where I can enter sensitive personal data about myself and nobody but dozens of VA web programmers and Evet program managers and their secretaries and I will have access to it.
What? Wait. I don’t...
Did they really say that?
Here’s the cream that floats to the top, the icing on this cake, the best of the best; If you download and install the Blue Button to your personal computer, you will be able to securely access and download and print and share all the data that you yourself put in to the system.
WOW! You get to accumulate your data. You get to do a lengthy registration process. You are given a good background check for the IPA process and then you can sit in front of your computer hour after hour and upload that data to your friendly and secure VA web site.
THEN, using that Blue Button...your VA will allow you to download that data. Yes, you will be able to access and download the data that you massaged and uploaded.
Keep in mind that there is no access to any of your medical records, no communication to any of your providers, no way that you’ll see clinic notes or lab and x-ray reports. You won’t be informed of upcoming appointments and you won’t be able to make an appointment. Only the data you upload yourself will be available to you.
If you go to ROI and get the last 6 months of your health data and then run home, you will be allowed to take that which you received from ROI and input it into Evet. Then you can access it via BLUE BUTTON.
Folks...I’m here to tell you that it isn’t every day that a deal like this one comes along. This is one in a million and I can see now the groundswell of veterans who will look at this, rise up on their hind legs and howl, “WTF is this all about???”
You can depend on your VA, via the Evet site to keep you informed with up-to-the-minute news too.
For example, we see;
After this one–time IPA process is complete, Veterans will have full access to their online Personal Health Record as it becomes available. Not only will they be able to refill their VA medications by name and view their VA Wellness Reminders, in the future they will be able to:
* Communicate electronically with participating VA health care providers through Secure Messaging (coming to local facilities throughout 2009 and 2010)
* Get VA Appointment Reminders and view VA Appointments (coming in 2010)
* View VA lab results (coming 2010)
Isn’t that great news for veterans? Let’s see...that was “Reviewed/Updated 7/8/2009”. It’s nearing the end of 2010 so all those things are here already. Right?
That news update is only 14 months old. Hey, c’mon...in VA terms, that’s almost yesterday. It’s just like counting dog years only different...like VA math, VA time is a mystery to we poor mortals.
Now you know about the latest offering from your VA. I’m sure you’re as astonished at this generous gesture as I am. To say I’m flabbergasted would be a gross understatement.
You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?'
Well, do ya punk?
If you do, go ahead, make my day.
Download that Blue Button to your computer. You can trust your VA. There wouldn’t be any malicious malware in there. Why would they install a keylogger script?
They promise to manage your most personal information with a high degree of security. You’re sure to get all the usual respect you usually get from your VA.
Let me know how that works out for you.
Seeing is believing. http://www.myhealth.va.gov/
(My thanks to Mr. Eastwood for the excellent quotes. I love my VA. If they didn’t do things like this, I’d have to make stuff up. Truth is much stranger than fiction in the life of a veteran.)
