Mr. HIStalk reports here that Kaiser Permanente members in Georgia are provided access to their own EMR data. Here is the link to the story and below is an excerpt from it:
...Kaiser Permanente has expanded its provision of electronic medical records (EMR) in Georgia. Kaiser Permanente members in the state can now now access portions of their medical records online, email their doctor's office with questions, view lab test results and review past office visit information online at their convenience. They also can view or cancel future appointments....It plans to add future services online such as scheduling appointments, viewing immunization and allergy records. Members can also set up reminders for preventive care screenings (mammograms, annual physical, etc.) Because of EMR, Kaiser Permanente was first to discover the Vioxx problem, which helped Merck voluntarily pull the drug from store shelves while it researched the situation. Members can already refill prescriptions online, get medical information on more than 40,000 health topics, use health calculators to determine things such as pregnancy due dates and talk to and receive support from other members about common health concerns in chat rooms and on message boards.
I have always been enthusiastic about the idea of providing patients with electronic access to some portion of their medical record. On one hand, it empowers patients and encourages them to become more engaged in their own health maintenance. I also believe that it will improve the quality of medical records because healthcare providers will be more careful about what they record, knowing that their patients will have ready access to the information.
I posted a note yesterday theorizing about the creation of personal health record (PHR) mash-ups (link here). This Kaiser project caused me to begin to muse about the distinction between an EMR that is made available to patients, as in the case of Kaiser, and a PHR derived in part on data extracted from the EMR. I finally decided that the the EMR is created by healthcare providers primarily to support their care functions whereas the PHR, as currently understood, is created by and for healthcare consumers. However, the distinction between two types of health records may begin to overlap as EMR data abstracts are replicated to the PHR.
I also had a question about the following quote from the article above: Because of EMR, Kaiser Permanente was first to discover the Vioxx problem. This statement is not totally accurate. Below is a quote from an article from 2004 discussing the number of deaths attributed to Vioxx (link here; emphasis mine).
David Graham, the associate director for science in FDA's office of drug safety, made the estimate [of the number of Vioxx caused deaths] based on 92.8 million U.S. prescriptions for Vioxx between 1999 and 2003. It's part of a study Graham conducted in cooperation with Kaiser Permanente.
It would be more accurate to say that the anailability of EMR data from
Kaiser helped to enable the discovery of the Vioxx problem by an FDA scientist. However, it would not be an overstatement to say that EMRs, as they become more commonplace, will be a rich source of data for early discovery of unexpected side effects of drugs.
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