Vaccination cards, insurance records, doctor bills, old lab reports—many of us have these bits and pieces of our medical history floating around at home. But it’s difficult to keep a complete record of our health information, since so much of it is housed only in our doctors’ files. And even if you’ve had the same primary care doctor for your entire adult life—a rarity for most people—that record may not tell the whole story. Information from specialists, emergency rooms, and urgent care centers often is not included, so it’s possible that there’s no single place where you can access all of your medical information in its entirety.
This means that when you visit a new doctor outside of your usual care network, and you need to fill out that extensive medical history form, you’re relying on your memory to inform them of chronic conditions, injuries, allergies, medications, treatments, and family history. It’s easy to forget something important, and that omission could affect the care you receive.
Obtaining medical records used to be difficult, but since 2000, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule has required providers to allow patients to access, inspect, and obtain a copy of their records. The 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act enabled the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to create certification standards for electronic health records (EHRs). Beginning in 2022, the 21st Century Cures Act began ensuring that providers can’t block patient access to their own health records.
As a result, your health history belongs to you and is available to you. But how can you best access (and organize) it? A review of the terminology relating to health records is a good place to start.
EMRs vs. EHRs
Strictly speaking, an electronic medical record (EMR) is simply a digital version of a patient’s medical chart. It could consist of scanned copies of physical pieces of paper, or information that has been entered online manually. An EMR provides data that are helpful to your doctor—such as the ability to track your condition or medication use over time—but it is not particularly portable. Most often, it can be accessed only by staff in your doctor’s office, and it may even have to be printed and mailed in order to be shared with you or another provider.
In contrast, an electronic heath record (EHR) is designed to contain information from—and be accessed by—every provider involved in your care. The idea is that it is comprehensive and contains test results, diagnoses, and medications from all providers that you’ve seen and will follow you as you receive care down the road from specialists, hospitals, or nursing homes anywhere in the U.S.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) reports that, as of 2021, 88 percent of office-based doctors in the U.S. use some sort of EHR, and 78 percent use one that meets the certification standards laid out by HHS. Because there isn’t one universal EHR, however, the ability of various EHRs to “talk” to each other and exchange patient information in a helpful way remains challenging.
Check—and recheck—your records
Most of us have been invited by a doctor’s office to join its patient portal, which is your access to your EHR (limited to that practice or healthcare system). There, you can view test results, make appointments, and handle billing. You likely can also download or share your information with another provider.
Patient portals can be very helpful, but if you see doctors in different healthcare systems, you may have a separate patient portal (with a different login and password) for your primary care provider, your dermatologist, your ophthalmologist, and so on.
It’s a good idea to check your existing EHR information as it stands now, and to check again after each provider visit. Although these records are largely accurate, mistakes can happen. And once a mistake is included in your record, doctors may copy and paste that incorrect information, so it spreads to other providers as well.
Important information can often get missed, too. As one extreme example, a research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine reported that in the state of California, 20 percent of patients listed as alive but with a serious illness were actually deceased. Many had multiple future appointments still on the books, others were sent reminders about preventive care such as flu shots, and still others had medication refills in the pipeline.
The takeaway here is that it’s often up to patients—or their family members—to update providers with current and accurate information. If you see a discrepancy or mistake, bring it up with that provider as soon as possible. And going forward, the best way to make sure you have a complete health record, to use whenever you need it, may be to create your own, in the form of a personal health record (PHR).
Adding PHRs to the mix
To create a PHR, you can start by downloading your information from each patient portal from all of your providers. Then you can organize the information in any form you like—a physical file with paper copies of everything, downloaded copies saved to a computer and stored in a designated folder, or an app on your phone. Having this info on your phone makes it easy and portable, and it’s also likely to be with you in the event of an unscheduled visit to urgent care or the emergency room.
Security surrounding your health information is a concern, of course, so keep it protected. Papers should be stored in a safe place in your home. Information stored on a computer should be password-protected, and the same is true of an app. However, it’s a good idea to share your login and password with trusted family members so they can access the information in the event that you need treatment and aren’t able to communicate with providers.
Lots of apps are available to host your health information, for both Apple and Android phones. Apple Health is available on Apple devices, and CommonHealth is one of several third-party apps available for Android devices. Other commonly downloaded and well-reviewed apps include FollowMyHealth, MyChart, and Tidy Health PHR. Some are free, while others have a one-time or annual fee for additional features like medication reminders or health tracking. To make sure your information is protected, look for an app that:
- securely downloads health records from your patient portals
- lets you securely view your information
- allows you to securely share information with a provider
- offers options on how to manage and control information within the app
- explains how it protects your security
- guarantees that it won’t sell or share your personal health information without your permission.
BOTTOM LINE: The most important thing you can do to ensure an accurate EHR is to check it yourself after each visit with your provider. If you choose to take the extra step of organizing your information into a PHR, you can continue to add to that record each time you have a doctor visit. And with access to all the data in your EHR, combined with careful record-keeping on your part, you can rest easy that you and your providers will have as complete a health history as possible, so that you can receive the best care possible when needed.
