In the USA personal health information has to be made available to patients electronically, upon request. This news item in The BMJ indicates that 96% of patients wanted to continue getting their results as soon as they were ready. (Furthermore, 95% of those whose results were 'non-normal' agreed they should have immediate access.)
Citation and extracts below.
CITATION: Access to records: Do open notes work for patients?
BMJ 2023; 381 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p789 (Published 13 April 2023)
Cite this as: BMJ 2023;381:p789
Joanne Silberner
Researchers at four medical centres across the US decided to ask. In the year after the act went into effect, they surveyed more than 43 000 people who had received results electronically after a medical exam. More than 8000 responded, with the results reported in JAMA Network Open on 20 March.
Tom Delbanco, professor of medicine at Harvard and a cofounder of Open Notes, a non-governmental organisation that has been advocating for healthcare transparency since 2010, expected that around 50% of the patients would be happy with immediate access to their records.
The survey showed that 95.7% wanted to continue getting their results as soon as they were ready, without hearing from a doctor first. “I was amazed,” Delbanco told The BMJ...
Under the act, health information has to be made available to patients electronically, upon request. Many healthcare providers have gone a step further, automatically sending results by email or other electronic notification; this, it turns out, is easier to do routinely for all patients rather than field individual requests...
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org