Medicare tests PHRs in South Carolina

Working with a group of outside contractors, CMS is testing a PHR program on 100,000 Medicare participants in South Carolina. To run the implementation, CMS is working with Gaithersburg, MD-based IT contractor QSSI, which will important two years' worth of Medicare claims data into a commercial PHR system from HealthTrio. As part of the rollout, CMS plans to run a large campaign not only to convince beneficiaries to participate, but also to get community providers to make use of the new PHR option. Over time, CMS plans to study the results from this and other previous PHR projects to examine whether patients and providers made use of the PHRs and how easy they were to use, among other factors.

To find out more about the project:
- read this Government Health IT piece

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