I’m gratified that the public conversation on electronic (and also paper) medical records continues. Its a dry topic, but oh so important. Ms. Sanger-Katz writes about Casey Quinlan (and her QR code!), and the difficulty of assembling a longitudinal health record that becomes more important as we get older. The morass of privacy, mistrust, bureaucracy, swiss-cheese implementation of EHR (electronic health records) with few electronic connections, throw numerous barriers into this journey. Open Notes is just the opening salvo in trying to ease that journey.
Those who succeed in pulling together their medical records to coordinate their care are lucky indeed:
Dr. Tierney worked for years in Indiana to help the state develop a cutting-edge health information exchange, a place where most of the state’s hospitals shared patients’ medical data. After 44 years in the state, he queried the exchange for his records before leaving. He paid $100 for an inch-and-a-half-thick stack of papers.
“I went to my new doctor,” he said. “I put it on the table. And she said, fill out the form.”
www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/upshot/release-your-medical-records-first-you-must-collect-them.html
