Dear Editor
The article by Dr Hossain and Dr Hannan summarised the benefits of public access to their own electronic health records. However, I do believe there are some drawbacks that we need to consider.
Firstly, I believe there are potential issues with confidentiality. I have seen this first hand in an intensive care setting. A patient had an emergency admission and the family used their phone, with access to their EHR, to look through their medical records in great detail. We do not know whether this is something the patient would have wanted, and we had no way to stop the family accessing this information. They then went on to ask the doctors on the unit about each result they found. This also brings me onto my second concern, how much information is too much? In this case, the doctors involved had to spend a significant amount of time explaining each test result that we had ordered, as the results appeared on the EHR that they had access to. Whilst I agree that patients and families should be well informed, surely explaining insignificant results and findings could become a big drain on time and resources for all doctors, and especially GPs.
Overall I do believe that empowering patients can be of great benefit, but it may become difficult to work out how much information to allow access to, and how to keep it secure.
Re: Empowering underserved groups through access to electronic health records