Who Should Access Electronic Patient Records

Abstract

Abstract:Access control to Electronic Patient Records (EPR) may greatly depend on users' objectives and needs. The purpose of this study is to assess the opinions of medical doctors within a university hospital towards access control to an EPR. We selected a randomized sample of 58 doctors from a university hospital and 45 structured interviews were applied. 42 respondents (93%) agree with the existence of access control levels to patient information according to healthcare professionals' category and 31 (69%) think that more sensitive information (e.g. HIV) should be accessed only by doctors that treat those patients. As 24 doctors (53%) feel that there is no need for them to see all information about all the patients, 41 (91%) think that nurses should not be able to do it also. Further, 31 doctors (69%) believe that patients themselves should not access their full medical record. These results show that it is very hard to get to a consensual policy regarding access control to EPR by its regular users. There is therefore the need for a multidisciplinary agreement that can include healthcare professionals' experiences and needs in order to define the most appropriate and efficient way to perform access control to the EPR.