US experience with transparent medical records should reassure doctors

In the US, the expansion of patient access to electronic medical records over the past decade has been accompanied by numerous studies investigating the experiences of patients and clinicians. Starting from about 2000, the use of patient portals to display test results spread rapidly, and in 2010, 100 primary care doctors volunteered to open their free text entries to 10 000 of their patients. By 2019, more than 50 million patients in the US had access to what their clinicians wrote about their medical care—entries known widely as open notes.1In 2021, the US federal government mandated that patients should have easy electronic access at no charge to all information held in their electronic health records.2 Today, patients can use readily available patient portals to access all the information a clinician might use to make decisions about their care in both inpatient and outpatient settings, including primary care and specialist notes,…
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