By Shobhit Saran - Asst. Vice President, Health Plans Consulting | Gati Patel – Healthcare Business Analyst, Perform+ Connect | Guninder Bhatia - Product Owner and Sr. Consultant (Enterprise Data Strategy & Interoperability)
Interoperability in Healthcare enables health information exchange between patient, provider, and payer to deliver transparent and equitable patient care. However, to enable seamless and secure data exchange across multiple connected systems, it is imperative to have patient consent.
Consent management and patient data privacy should be the major design considerations while enabling patient data access via healthcare APIs to ensure that the patient protected health information is not being exploited by any unknown system.
Consent management refers to the process and system of collecting and managing patient’s affirmation for using and sharing of Patient Protected Health Information (PHI). It also empowers patients to set up privacy preferences to control who, under what conditions, and for what purpose will have access to their protected health information (PHI). It facilitates the dynamic creation, management and enforcement of consumer, organizational and jurisdictional privacy directives.
The process to enable consent management may appear simple, however it is challenging to create one such comprehensive solution.
This blog covers the following sections:
Key challenges in building a comprehensive consent management system
CitiusTech’s consent management system
CitiusTech’s Consent Management system offers a comprehensive consent management system working on AWS and featuring the CMS compliant requirements along with consent tracking and security labeling.
Consent signing and data retrieval process workflow
Below workflow illustrates a typical consent signing and data retrieval process by a third-party application:
Figure 1: Workflow of a typical consent signing and data retrieval process by a third-party application
Key features of consent management system
Different healthcare organizations may have different needs when it comes to a Consent Management System. However, there are a few features that are crucial to today’s healthcare organizations.
1. Cloud-Based deployment
Cloud-based consent management has gained more traction substantially, as it allows information to be accessed wherever and whenever needed. The consent management system developed by CitiusTech also leverages cloud storage like GCP, AWS and Azure. This gives it the flexibility to permit members & payers to access/manage records without any geographical constraints.
2. Flexible and scalable
The Consent management system should be flexible enough to support various requirements of healthcare organizations. It’s great if it facilitates an option for both on-site storage and hybrid storage (cloud-based & on-site), so organizations can choose a suitable option.
The Consent Management should be modular enough with a plug-and-play feature that allows consent management system to work seamlessly with third-party applications & web portals.
3. Data security
Security labeling is yet another crucial feature. To ensure the members’ information and the consent records are accessed and stored securely, a consent management system must configure security policies, state-level policies, and patron regulations. It needs to be compliant to the latest healthcare rules and regulations.
4. Accessibility
The consent management should support both offline consents and consents on-the-go to enhance accessibility and easiness.
Conclusion
To wrap this up, a comprehensive consent management system defines the success of the true interoperable solution as well as its compliance to CMS interoperability and patient access rule requirements. CitiusTech’s consent management system is a comprehensive solution that addresses the key challenges while offering features that are pivotal to today’s healthcare organizations.