SEP 10, 2012 11:45am ET

Nurses Challenged to Ask for their Own Medical Records

The Alliance for Nursing Informatics and American Nurses Association have teamed with the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT to encourage nurses across the nation to ask for a copy of their own electronic health records.

In doing so, nurses will become more aware of their rights to their own health information and can share the experience with patients and families, according to a posting on ONC’s Buzz Blog page. The goal of the initiative is to increase patient use of personal health records and patients from 10 percent to 25 percent during the next two years.

The initiative is one of many programs being launched during National Health I.T. Week. ONC also is challenging EHR vendors to quickly support the ability of patients to view, download and transmit their health information, which is a requirement under Stage 2 of the meaningful use program. The first four vendors to pledge view/download/transmit capability by the HIMSS Conference in early 2013 are athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, Greenway Medical and SOAPware.

More information on the nursing pledge is available here.

EHR

Consumer Health

Group Practices

Hospitals

Policy & Regulation

Stimulus

Comments (3)

Wonder if that would finally make nurses fight for commonsense in charting. How many time and date stamps and legalese will it take to make a nurse go crazy? How long will it take to find the 2 lines of essential information in a 8 page Charting of an up-coded level V visit note? A nice psychological experiment indeed. I hope they take the photos of the nurses with a candid camera as they view their electronic Med records ( of course with the standard informed consent in small print, legal mumbo-jumbo, time and date stamp ) and post these on youtube for the fun of it! EMR generated hash should make someone smile ..if not the patient at least the public... One of my colleagues has saved 1200 pages of fax he received from an EMR! Never ever make the mistake of requesting medical record. Always ask for the specific documents you want.

Posted by Narayanachar M | Monday, September 10 2012 at 9:44PM ET

As a nurse and strong advocate for giving patients electronic access to their medical records, simply asking for a copy of anything is not the way to encourage patients to engage in their healthcare! I once made the mistake of asking for a "copy of" my son's medical records and was charged a ridiculous amount of money at a per page rate - including all of the blank pages of paper that were spewed out. It was meaningless to me - if given electronic access, we can make this information much more actionable and finally put patients at the center of healthcare as so many Health Systems state in their Mission Statements.

Posted by Lori B | Thursday, September 13 2012 at 5:30PM ET