December 6, 2017 – Patients and EHRs

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Anchor lead: Should you as a patient be able to enter data into your electronic health record? Elizabeth Tracey reports

The jury is out on whether you as a patient should be able to enter data into your own health record, but with the plethora of monitoring devices for blood sugar, blood pressure and other body functions the day can’t be far off. Timothy Niessen, an internal medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, examines what’s known.

Niessen: How often does patient entered data provide new value? And it does at least in one in five of the cases. For many diseases there’s a lot of interest in patient reported outcomes as an important way to understand how effective are our treatments. Many of us care about life and death, hospitalization, but maybe those really aren’t the outcomes that matter to our patients. Maybe having things like patient reported outcomes and having those directly entered into our medical record would be of great importance.   :30

Niessen says such a practice could be adopted on a limited, provisional basis to see how the additional data may help. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.