Using the Electronic Medical Record to Keep Hospital Patients Informed

The increasing availability of electronic hospital records has already improved hospital process and provided indirect benefits to patients through increased provider efficiency. However, to date, electronic medical records are typically not presented to patients during hospital visits, and are not structured to be accessible to patients. We suggest that the lack of patient-friendly views into the medical record represents a missed opportunity to keep patients more informed about their own care, more engaged in dialog with physicians, and ultimately more compliant with medical instructions when they leave the hospital. In this position paper, we describe the basis for this perspective, we summarize our own results from a study exploring patient and provider responses to real-time, patient-facing views into a hospital’s electronic medical record (EMR), and we propose future work regarding the automation of such displays.