Feds want wider use of health records applet

The Department of Veterans Affairs developed Blue Button and launched it in 2010 on the agency's My HealtheVet portal as a way of giving military veterans online access to their medical records. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Defense soon followed, and the White House and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT are promoting Blue Button as a technology that can provide access to medical records in the private sector. The White House's new Blue Button for America initiative recently brought in technology fellows as part of an effort to enable all Americans to download their own health records.