Dispute Resolution in Healthcare

At the recent Health 2.0 conference, I was asked an interesting question. If there is a dispute about any data in healthcare - PHR, EHR, or Health Information Exchange, how is it resolved?

eBay does millions of transactions via the internet and it has automated, web-based dispute resolution workflows. Can healthcare learn something from eBay?

On May 5, I will be attending a workshop in Washington called "Online Dispute Resolution in a Technology-oriented Healthcare World.�

The attendees are evenly split between representatives of the Healthcare, Dispute Resolution and Computer Science communities.

The goals of the meeting are:
*Identify the key risks of disputes in the networked health information technology environment.
*Identify the best practices in avoiding and resolving such disputes and the need for new dispute prevention/resolution approaches in problem areas.
*Identify the computing and other research challenges inherent in supporting these practices.

You'll find a list of attendees and the conference background materials online.

As the recent work with I've done with e-Patient Dave illustrates, Personal Health Records should have a process for resolving data issues. If such a feature would have been built into Patientsite, Google Health or Microsoft Health, we might have identified the issues with administrative data and PHRs sooner.

I will report back next week with lessons learned from the conference, included recommended next steps for the software we use with patients at BIDMC.

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