The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT could include measures for the use and promotion of patient portals and direct access to their data in the next stage of meaningful use. Patient data could also be downloaded to a personal health record. The portal could go a step further and give patients the option of receiving their summary information with tags that allow data to be broken down into smaller pieces or data elements and be shared as the first step toward a broad vision of health information exchange that a presidential commission outlined last year. An advisory panel has come up with exchange uses that link meaningful use and the report from PCAST (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology), where they intersect at the importance of engaging the patient.
