Special interests and congressional inaction blocked efforts to track the safety of electronic medical records, leaving patients at risk.
Despite laws requiring that health care providers hand over copies of patient records in a timely fashion, many people have trouble getting theirs. Ciitizen, a Palo Alto, Calif., company that helps cancer patients with the task, recently published a scorecard that rates hospitals, doctors and clinics on their compliance with records requests.
In 2009 I wrote about my first-hand frustrations as a physician with Press Ganey patient satisfaction surveys. A decade on, has my hell gotten worse?
Electronic health records can help reduce medical errors, but when not used well they can strain the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Wei Wei Lee, an internist with the University of Chicago Medicine, has developed strategies to make sure tech is a tool, not a barrier.
Some patient advocates say your doctor’s notes offer insights you might never hear from your physician, putting patient and provider on the same page.
Lawmakers and patients want to eliminate “surprise” out-of-network medical bills. Hospitals, doctors and insurers say they want to eliminate them, too, but their opposition to one another’s proposals could complicate legislative efforts. Stephanie Armour of The Wall Street Journal, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico and Kimberly Leonard of the Washington Examiner join KHN’s Julie Rovner to discuss this, plus the latest in news about reproductive health and health care sharing ministries.
Giving consumers more knowledge about the costs of care has long been desired, but administration officials cautioned it could take two years or more for useful data to appear in a phone app.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), head of the influential HELP committee, wants to make it easier to share and store detailed medical histories.
In an interview, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb reacts to a KHN/Fortune investigation of the drawbacks and risks of electronic health records.
The U.S. government claimed that ditching paper medical charts for electronic records would make health care better, safer and cheaper. Ten years and $36 billion later, the digital revolution has gone awry.