Workers' Compensation: The Road toward Fully Transparent Medical Records

Thursday, December 5, 2013

The Road toward Fully Transparent Medical Records

Privacy of medical data in the workers' compensation system does not exist. Federal portability act excluded worker's Compensation claims. In some jurisdictions, claimants are able to seek declaratory relief to shield the records. The processes costly, onerous, and incompatible with the underlining summary and remedial legislative intent of a viable Worker's Compensation program. Today's post was shared by NEJM and comes from www.nejm.org

Perspective
Jan Walker, R.N., M.B.A., Jonathan D. Darer, M.D., M.P.H., Joann G. Elmore, M.D., M.P.H., and Tom Delbanco, M.D.
December 4, 2013DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1310132

Article: Forty years ago, Shenkin and Warner argued that giving patients their medical records “would lead to more appropriate utilization of physicians and a greater ability of patients to participate in their own care.”1 At that time, patients in most states could obtain their records only through litigation, but the rules gradually changed, and in 1996 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act entitled virtually all patients to obtain their records on request. Today, we're on the verge of eliminating such requests by simply providing patients online access. Thanks in part to federal financial incentives,2 electronic medical records are becoming the rule, accompanied increasingly by password-protected portals that offer patients laboratory, radiology, and pathology results and secure communication with their clinicians by e-mail.
One central component of the records, the notes composed by clinicians, has remained largely hidden from patients. But now OpenNotes, an initiative fueled primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is exploring the effects of providing access to these notes.3 Beginning in 2010, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (which serves urban and suburban Boston), Geisinger Health System (in rural Pennsylvania), and Harborview Medical Center (Seattle's...