1 What is Flower?

Right now Flower is in flux, it's early days and people are only beginning to outline the goals for Flower. What has been decided is that…

• Flower will provide the mechanism that health care organizations use to transmit medical data between each other.
• Flower will provide an interface that people will use to ensure that they have control over who has access (or has accessed) their medical data.
• Flower will provide an easy-to-use and intuitive mechanism that will enable health care professionals to ask a patient for access to some or all of their data as well as a mechanism for people grant or deny that access.

Flower isn't trying to provide a personal health or electronic medical record. What they are trying to do is sketch out how an emergency room physician at your hospital might reach out to your primary care physician to find out more about you, and how this can be done in such a way that you feel in control and your privacy is protected while at the same time ensuring that you get the best care possible. It is no small feat! If you look around for other products that are working to meet this need, you won't find much. Flower looks to be the trailblazer, in fact, they may be the only people trying to address this very real need.

The concept of Flower was first articulated in *public* on this blog as part of the threaded comments which followed a phenomenal discussion (for those who haven't followed along) on EHRs and *Meaningful Use*.

The FLOWER team is highly motivated for a number of reasons... most of us are practicing physicians... we deal with the glaring HIT flaws present in health care everyday. We are forced to rely, as the primary means of information transfer in medicine, on the fax machine. --- It was not difficult for us to recognize the overwhelming need for FLOWER.

Many are HIT professionals as well and are capable of articulating the engineering, design, privacy issues we will face. Two of the participants are the ultimate e-patients, and their input is invaluable. Lastly we have a physician, e-patient, and disruptive innovator with tremendous proven talents in refining objectives and bringing concepts to fruition.

We have no idea whether or not we will be successful... but I assure you, it will not be for lack of trying,  lack of effort or lack of talent.... but we will push on... because, in the end--- WE ARE ALL PATIENTS!