Vince Kuraltis, a healthcare IT consultant, tweeted this the other day:

He’s referring to the fact that each of his healthcare providers has a different patient portal run by a different IT vendor with a separate log-in and separate data and functionality. Providers are launching patient portals to allow patients to view clinical records, refill prescriptions, email their providers, etc. The point is to better engage patients in their health. It's a very important effort. But as Vince points out, the disconnected and fragmented experience can be really frustrating for patients.

This challenge is quite similar to the challenge that banking faced years ago as they took their customer experience online. Personally, I have accounts with Bank of America, Fidelity, eTrade, American Express and a few others. All of these accounts have separate web “portals” with separate log-ins. That's frustrating. But not really. Because I spend very little time on any of them. Most of my time is spent on Mint.com, where I’ve integrated all of these accounts into one place. From there, I can view all of my transactions and balances, track expenses and create budgets. It's great. It's has award-winning UI/UX and everything is one place.

Mint has taken the bottom-up approach. They started by building a platform for the consumer. And the consumer allows data from multiple vendors to be integrated into their account.

Healthcare needs a similar bottom-up approach.

We need a portal that allows us to integrate all of the data collected on us from our dentist that runs Dentrix software, our primary care doctor that runs eClinicalWorks, our gastroenterologist that runs Epic, our wife’s OBGYN that runs Cerner and our child’s pediatrician that runs Allscripps. All of that data could be neatly compiled into a really user-friendly website (and app), similar to Mint. If I move to a new area and select a new primary care provider, she could simply tap into my account and view all of my scans, test results, prescriptions, etc.

As we consider all of the controversy around forcing EMR vendors to become more interoperable and share patient data with one another, in some ways, you can argue that this isn’t their role.

Why should Bank of America freely pass data they’ve captured about me to Fidelity (a competitor)? They don’t want to do this because they want me to stay with them, not make it easy to use other vendors. Why is that any different than asking UCLA Medical Center to pass my data to USC Medical Center? It would be nice if they did, but I'm not sure it's the government's role to force them to do something that might not be aligned with their competitive interests.

The bottom-up, consumer led approach circumvents this entire conflict. We need a patient portal that starts with the patient, that allows providers (and their EMR vendors) to plug-in (if they'd like). Not the other way around.