WHAT IS A PATIENT SUMMARY

The International Patient Summary, or IPS, is an emerging global standard for documenting and sharing key information about your health. An IPS document contains all of the essentials from your patient record: medications, allergies, problems, immunizations, test results, procedures, and much more.

The International part of IPS means that the information can be used by healthcare providers anywhere in the world. Just having a copy of your IPS is good, but having an IPS that you can easily share with providers, or even family members, is truly valuable. And just because it’s designed for international use, doesn’t mean that it can’t be really useful anytime you want to share information about your health, wherever you are.

CommonHealth exists so that you can collect, manage, and share your health information, and with the Patient Summary feature, sharing your clinical information is easier and more meaningful than ever.

HOW IT WORKS

CommonHealth lets you collect your health information from thousands of healthcare providers across the US. When you connect CommonHealth to your providers’ patient portal, you download your available clinical records to your mobile phone. You can also store vaccination records and lab tests given to you as SMART Health Cards.

Once you have your health records on your phone, CommonHealth does the hard work of organizing and compiling them. Following the World Health Organization’s endorsed standardized IPS guidelines, CommonHealth compiles current and medically important information and builds your Patient Summary.

When you’re ready to share your Patient Summary, CommonHealth uses SMART® Health Links technology to create an encrypted, secure, temporary, passcodeprotected copy of your record in the cloud. You’re given a QR code and a link, and only you and the people you trust with the link AND passcode are able to access and decrypt your data. The Commons Project can’t even see your Patient Summary data. When your doctor or family member scans your QR code using any internet-connected device with a camera, they can enter the passcode you provide them, and securely view a nicely formatted version of your Patient Summary. If your provider's Electronic Health Record system supports SMART Health Links and IPS, they can import your records directly.

HOW TO SHARE YOUR IPS IN COMMONHEALTH

First make sure you have connected your CommonHealth app to at least one healthcare provider data source. Once you have downloaded your clinical records to your phone, the Patient Summary feature will become available.

To create and share your Patient Summary:

  1. Select “Share My Clinical Summary” button from the Summary Screen

  2. Review the Information about the Clinical Summary, how it is protected, and how you share the summary.

  3. Give your summary a Title

  4. Enter a six digit passcode to protect your summary

  5. Select the length of time you would like the summary to expire

  6. Select “Share Access”

That’s it, your Patient Summary will be created and made available within the CommonHealth application for you to share and view. If you want to delete your Patient Summary prior to the expiration time that you set, you simply select “Delete” and all of your encrypted data will be deleted permanently

FOR PROVIDERS & DEVELOPERS

PROVIDERS: HOW TO VIEW YOUR PATIENT’S PATIENT SUMMARY

As a healthcare provider, your patients may wish to share their IPS with you. You may even want to encourage them to do so!

They could do this by holding up a QR code for you to scan in your office. You can scan this QR code with any tablet, smartphone, or even a laptop or desktop computer with a camera. They might also send you a link via a secure message. The patient will also need to provide you with a temporary passcode.

When you scan the QR or click the link, you will be prompted to enter the passcode. From there, you will get access to the IPS in a convenient, tabular format in your web browser. You will also be able to view and copy the raw FHIR data behind the IPS if so interested.

The summary will be available for up to 72 hours, but possibly less so check with your patient if you would like to refer to it again at a later time. In the future, we expect Electronic Health Record systems to have built in support for importing IPS documents. Be sure to speak with your vendor if this is of interest to you.

DEVELOPERS: WHAT ELSE TO KNOW?

A CommonHealth Patient Summary document follows the IPS standards guidance and, specifically, the HL7 FHIR International Patient Summary Implementation Guide. The IPS document is shared as a FHIR bundle using the SMART Health Links protocol. The SMART Health Cards and Links Reader application is freely available and open source, and said source code might be a good starting point if you are looking to decode SHLink-based IPS documents.