Patient access to electronic health records: Differences across ten countries

Abstract

Objectives: Patient-accessible electronic health records (PAEHRs) are being implemented at international scale. Comparing policies and systems could allow countries to learn from each other to address global and nation-specific challenges. We compare national PAEHR policy (hard and soft regulation) and services in 10 countries. Methods: PAEHR policy and system documentation was gathered from Australia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United States. A basic analytic model for policy analysis was used to delimit our focus to policy content, followed by an inductive thematic analysis across countries, in which we clustered initial themes into a set of categories of PAEHR service “approaches” related to three specific content areas. Results: Although all 10 countries ensured some patient rights to access medical records, policies and systems were highly variable, as were the technological processes arising from these. In particular, three policy areas showed great variability. Depending upon country of origin, a patient would encounter differences in: login procedures (security), access to own and other patients’ data during adolescence (user rights), and types of medical data made available to the patient (data sets). Conclusions: Individuals encounter very different access rights to their health data depending on where they live. Countries may be able to develop improved policies by examining how other nations have solved common problems. Harmonizing policies is also an initial step likely to be needed before cross-national PAEHRs could be possible.