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 (also referred to as Clinical 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 healthcare providers’ patient portal, you can download your available clinical health 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 app does the hard work of organizing and compiling them. Following the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 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, passcode-protected copy of your health record that can be stored in our secure AWS cloud for up to 72 hours. In order to share your Patient Summary, you will need to request a QR code or a link to the QR code and create a passcode.

Only you and those with whom you share the QR code or link and your passcode can access and decrypt your data. Our organization does not have access to your Patient Summary data or the health information stored on your device.

When your doctor or family member scans your QR code,(using any internet-connected device with a camera), and enters the passcode you provide to them, they can securely view a nicely formatted version of your Patient Summary. In addition, if your healthcare provider's Electronic Health Record (“EHR”) system supports SMART Health Links and IPS, they can import your records directly.

HOW TO SHARE YOUR IPS IN COMMONHEALTH

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 be available (can be up to 72 hours).

  6. Select “Share Access.”

That’s it, your Patient Summary will be created and made available within the CommonHealth app for you to share and view. Please note that your Patient Summary will only be viewable for the duration you selected. If your Patient Summary expires, you can follow the same steps above to generate a new one for viewing and sharing. There is no limit to the number of your Patient Summaries you can generate.

If you want to delete your Patient Summary prior to the expiration time that you set, you simply select “Delete” on the Patient Summary you’d like to delete, and all of that 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! Patients can do this by sharing a QR code for you to scan in your office. You can scan the QR code with any tablet, smartphone, laptop or desktop computer with a camera. They can also send you a link via a secure message. The patient will also need to provide you with a temporary passcode, either verbally or through a secure message.

When you scan the QR or click the link, you will be prompted to enter the passcode provided to you by the patient. Once the passcode is entered, you will have access to the IPS in a convenient, tabular format in your device’s web browser. You will also be able to view and copy the raw FHIR data behind the IPS.The patient has the option of making the Patient Summary available for up to 72 hours. Please check with the patient to determine the exact length of time the summary will be available, especially if you would like to refer to it again at a later time.

In the future, we expect EHR 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.