Patients and clinicians: joint owners of a fully transparent, electronic medical record

Tom Delbanco, MD, is a nationally recognized and published primary care internist who is exploring the use of the EMR to support ambulatory care. He is the Koplow-Tullis Professor of General Medicine and Primary Care at Harvard Medical School and is the founder of the Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA.  He describes his experience with e-Patient communication and EMR data sharing with his patients, discussing both benefits and risks for the patient and clinician. Dr. Delbanco defines barriers to this approach and how to overcome them, success factors, costs, and patient satisfaction considerations. He reviews the requirements for supporting email communication, secure messaging and e-visits and points to the future as he examines issues of patient control, instant transcription, connectivity to multiple data sources, language translations, multimedia education, and integration with home based diagnostic technologies.