A Healthy Connection: Modeling, Prioritizing and Piloting Veterans' My HealtheVet Patient Portal Meaningful Use Measures

• Main Author: Garvin, Lynn Andrea
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01.01.2014
• Subjects: Health care management; Information Technology; Military studies; Organizational behavior
• ISBN: 9781321284027; 1321284020

Accelerating patient adoption and meaningful use of health information technology (health IT) is a broad-reaching goal of the U.S. healthcare system and a specific aim of the Veterans Affairs (VA) Transformation Initiatives. VA's My HealtheVet (MHV) patient portal offers Veterans a suite of online tools to support their care coordination with clinicians and their own self-management. Two critical tools include MHV's "Blue Button," which allows Veterans to download their personal health records for their review and for sharing with trusted others, and Secure Messaging, which enables Veterans to engage in online communication with their healthcare team. Research at VA and other U.S. healthcare systems has shown that technology like MHV can improve patient health and quality of care, patient and clinician satisfaction, and system efficiency. But to date, no U.S. health system has established patient meaningful use measures to facilitate broad, rapid patient adoption and best practice use as authorized by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. This study consolidates, refines and validates measures of Veterans' Meaningful Use of the My HealtheVet suite of tools, including Blue Button and Secure Messaging. It contributes to the fields of health policy, healthcare management, information technology and organizational behavior in four ways: (1) defining and operationalizing a model of patient meaningful use of health IT, (2) applying mixed methods to validate patient meaningful use measures, (3) developing implementation insights for support and training of patients and clinicians, as well as the enhancement of patient portal tools, (4) offering evidenced-based support for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) Stage 3 "Meaningful Use" rules for patient engagement using personal health records, secure messaging and other patient-facing technologies.