By the fall of 2009, if all goes as planned, Oregon’s 400,000 Medicaid recipients could be receiving a higher quality of health care through one high-tech change, according to the Department of Human Services. The agency is taking the lead on an effort to put the patients’ records online.
The records would be accessible to authorized health care providers and would not be available to outside interests who seek to market or use the information in those records.
But the Health Records Bank of Oregon program for Medicaid patients is just the first part of an effort to file most Oregonians’ health care records in an online database as part of compliance with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly known as HIPAA.
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Read the full editorial in the Corvallis Gazette Times