Digital identity is enhancing the open and trusted exchange of medical data between patients and healthcare professionals.
New data has highlighted the need again for secure networks enabled by patient federated interfaces.
In a disappointing statement, the study by healthITbuzz states that white patients are more likely to be offered and use a patient portal to their electronic health data, while ethnic patients who typically do not report not being offered portal access use other mobile apps.
54% of black patients were offered a patient portal as opposed 65% of white patients.
In 2019, the majority of hospitals and surgeries offered patient portals, however encouragement to use portals by providers differed between demographic groups, contributing to disparities in patient access.
Eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in patient portal offers should be the driving concern to ensure equity by design of federated access systems.
In 2020, ONC published the Cures Act Final Rule, which sought to advance patient access to EHI by calling for health IT developers to adopt application programming interfaces (APIs) that could enable patients to access their patient data using health apps via via their mobile device.
Source: HINTS 5, Cycle 3 (2019) and Cycle 4 (2020)
