24th June 2014
Earlier this year Profitable Practice covered the issues surrounding the ‘opt-out’ of sharing personal medical records. However, in a recent YouGov poll – carried out for IT system supplier EMIS - around nine in ten members of the British public want healthcare professionals to have electronic access to key data from their GP records. A large majority believe that with secure access to their information, long-term health conditions, allergies and medical history can be observed and treated in a more efficient manner. Over two thirds of the respondents believe that it would reduce avoidable errors and save patients having to repeat their information to different clinicians, with 58% ‘unaware’ that hospital doctors are often unable to view GP records electronically.
EMIS chief executive Chris Spencer commented that it was easy to understand why patients were worried about the accessibility of their records: “This survey confirms what we knew anecdotally to be true – that the vast majority of patients want clinicians to have access to their [records] at the point of care, and assume this happens as a matter of course.” Almost two-thirds of the survey population expressed concern that a failure in networking could result in delayed treatment or ‘potentially life-threatening’ medical errors.