Healthcare Needs Help On TransparencyHealthcare Needs Help On Transparency
The industry will need to get over its skittishness about sharing electronic health records with patients. Because patients will demand full access to their digital records, plain and simple.
Some 15,000 people now use the Institute of Family Health's portal to view records, Dr. Calman said. But he predicted it won't be long until patients expect to get their records in a downloadable form of their choosing--and that HIPAA and other regulations will be amended to give patients that kind of portable access to their records.
Concerns that patients will misinterpret lab results are legitimate. And letting patients add their own comments or data to their health records does raise some new legal liability questions. But health IT leaders and their clinical peers shouldn't waste their time trying to stop this transparency movement and instead must pour their energy and intellects into coming up with workable solutions. (And there was plenty of that in evidence at the forum.)
Concerned that a patient will misunderstand a test result? Health providers will need to arm that patient beforehand with information about what the test's looking for, and where to get more information about it. They'll need to push EHR vendors to build more such links into their products -- links to reliable data sources, right from an EHR portal.
Giving people access to their medical records is closely related to another phenomenon: people turning to Google or Facebook as soon as they get a diagnosis. Anyone who has done that knows you're likely to read a lot of worst-case scenarios and quackery, and can understand why Debra Wolf, a professor of nursing at Slippery Rock University, says that social media "frightens me to death."
People are "going out to find patients like themselves," said Wolfe, in an earlier discussion at the information Healthcare Forum. "What frightens me is they don't know how to safely evaluate a website."
Noteworthy is the fact that Wolfe is looking for ways providers are helping patients get better information, not hoping to cut off access. At some hospitals, when nurses are discharging patients, they’ve been trained to ask, "Are you using a website for health information?" and offer tools to assess a site's quality and reliable sites that people might consider using. People will inevitably look to the Web and social sources for healthcare insights, so "we need to meet them out there," Wolfe said.
Same goes for people's digital health records. As patients demand access, health IT leaders will need to focus on making that experience valuable, not getting in the way.
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