Although most people agree it's important to have health information on-hand, many acknowledge there are challenges to accessing their data in an emergency, according to a Quest Diagnostics survey.
Quest Diagnostics, a network of clinical testing laboratories, tapped market research firm Kelton Global to poll a nationally representative sample of 1,004 U.S. adults for its survey on how people store their health information.
The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
Four survey insights:
1. The majority of respondents (87 percent) cited various reasons it would be important to have access to their health information online, such as during emergencies. Forty-seven percent of respondents also said they would like online access to their health information to help inform care decisions for them and their family members.
2. Nearly one-third of respondents said they store their lab results in a file cabinet at home. This trend was also true for millennials, despite being a generation often associated with being highly connected to the internet.
3. Eighty-two percent of adults said that they or a family member have had a lab test in the past year. However, 30 percent said they didn't keep these lab results or that they no longer know where they are.
4. Forty percent of respondents said they either don't have online access to their lab results, or aren't sure if they have online access to these results.