Why Should Patients Control Their Health Data? Here Are A Few Ideas.

Lately, healthcare organizations have begun working to give patients more access to their personal health data. They’ve concluded that the more control patients have, the more engaged they become in your care, which in turn leads to better outcomes. But patient engagement isn’t the only reason for giving patients the keys to their PHI. In fact, organizational control of patient health data can cause problems for everyone in the healthcare data exchange chain. An item found on the Allscripts blog does a nice job of articulating issues that can arise.  According to the blog item, those issues include the following: The patient is in the best position to address inconsistencies in their medical record. For example, if one doctor diagnoses the patient with asthma, then another physician conclusively demonstrates the patient is not asthmatic, the patient can reconcile the two physicians’ conclusions. Patients have a better overview of their care than most doctors. When a chronically ill patient sees multiple clinicians, their impressions may conflict with one another, but the patient can provide context on their overall conditions. If a patient consents to multiple uses of their health data, and the consents seem to be in conflict, only the patient can articulate what their intentions were. If the master patient indexing process generates a false match with someone else’s records, the patient will recognize this immediately, while physicians may not. Giving pat...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Healthcare Healthcare Interoperability HIE Patients Allscripts Health Data Exchange Master Patient Index Medical Records Management Patient Engagement Patient Health Data Source Type: blogs