When determining who should control patients' medical records data, healthcare professionals are almost evenly divided between thinking hospitals and clinics or patients themselves should manage access, according to a recent Reaction Data report.
For its HHS Interoperability Mandate report, Reaction Data in February surveyed almost 180 healthcare professionals, including clinicians, C-suite executives and IT leaders, about their opinions on patient data access and the overall impact of HHS' proposed interoperability rules. The regulations would require the health IT industry to adopt standard application programming interfaces to help patients more easily access their health data.
Seventy-five percent of healthcare professionals said they think the impact of the interoperability mandate would be positive and that the interoperability barriers should be eliminated to improve access to patient information, according to the report.
However, there was not as much consensus when the survey participants were asked who should then control access to patient information. Of the respondents, 48 percent said they believe the control should belong to the patients themselves, 47 percent said it should belong to hospitals and clinics and 5 percent said it should fall to the health IT vendors.
Despite their split opinions on who should maintain access control of patient data, only 5 percent of the report's participants said the patients themselves should have no rights in controlling or accessing their data. These 5 percent of participants offered the following reasons for their opinions:
· Patients are ignorant of medical terminology/diagnosis: 71 percent
· Inability to track transfer of patient data: 17 percent
· Increase in lawsuits: 8 percent
· Providers create patient info and should own it: 4 percent
Click here to access the full report.
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