We are ready to start!

The meetings continued... There are considerable concerns that the secure communication between patients and the clinic is too cumbersome to set up and the workflow of managing these incoming messages must be customizable to each clinic environment. Patients must be aware, and must sign the consent to make sure expectations are clear (see http://myoscar.org/consent). We gave ourselves extra time until November 15, 2011 to make modification to the secure messaging system to better meet the needs of the participating clinics. When MyOSCAR is rolled out this Friday, patients won't be permitted to receive any clinic record or secure messaging until they are authenticated (proving who they say they are) by clinic staff. We will provide many different methods to make it easier for patients to do so.

So before we send out patient's invitation and their account information, these are the steps we have to follow:

1. Set up MyOSCAR accounts for all the participating providers and the research assistant. In order for these providers to use their existing EMR (OSCAR) to make transactions with the patient's MyOSCAR accounts they have to add their own MyOSCAR account ID's in their OSCAR account. The newly hired clinical liason person will be meeting each of these providers one on one to walk them through.

2. A list of active patients have been created and participating providers have scanned through the list to make sure all the patients are in fact active. We discovered in this process that a few (not that many) patients have in fact already left the practice. There is a delay between when a patient leaves a practice to when the government sends us the acknowledgement that the patient has been de-rostered.

3. Students have been hired to create MyOSCAR accounts for patients of the participating practices. It is estimated that it will take about 2-5 minutes for each account to be created, an individualized invitation letter to be printed and the letter along with the consent information be folded and inserted into an envelope. We are playing it safe to create these accounts one by one instead of batch. I think in the future we should be able to do this in a batch mode.

I think we are ready... fingers crossed!

David Chan