Ted Eytan, M.D., M.P.H., writes about the benefits of providing full disclosure of health records to the patient:
My first exposure to the “for doctors’ eyes only” concept of the medical record occurred in high school, when I was working in a community hospital, and a patient waiting for a diagnostic exam began thumbing through the hospital chart that was placed at the bedside. To inform me about this breach in protocol, a staff member approached me and said, “Do you normally let patients in the holding area read their own charts?”
Now that we have the technology to share patients’ medical records with them, and they’ve made it clear that they want this access, we still do not provide it because we practice within a professional and societal culture that is used to the norm of keeping this information to itself. It is time to consider a different norm, though, where everything about a patient is shared with the patient and justification is needed to keep things secret.
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