The HITECH Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act place new emphasis on the widespread and meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs). This is an important advance, with one significant exception: Currently EHRs fail to capture data reflecting crucial health behaviors and psychosocial issues. Such patient-reported variables are both health outcomes themselves, and major determinants of other health outcomes. Capturing a standardized set of patient-reported variables in the EHR would lead to unprecedented data harmonization and opportunities to improve health care and health research.
Several institutes from the National Institutes of Health in collaboration with the Society of Behavioral Medicine are organizing an effort to evaluate and recommend actionable, patient-reported measures of health behaviors and psychosocial factors for use in primary care electronic health records (EHRs). In order to facilitate broad participation in the development of standard measures we are using a three-phase process of consensus building.
The first phase involved convening a panel of subject matter experts who have suggested one or more reliable, practical measures in each subject domain that would be appropriate to utilize in adult primary care and public health settings to be reported in EHRs (see below for list of constructs being assessed and criteria used by the experts).