The CINTESIS researcher Ana Luísa Neves wants to determine the impact of sharing electronic health records with patients in the quality of health care delivery. The study protocol, developed together with researcher from the Imperial College London (United Kingdom) and the Macquarie University (Australia), was recently published in the BMJ Open.
“In the last decade, electronic health records have emerged as a promising solution to increase patients’ access to their clinical information. Currently, there are several platforms that allow sharing those clinical data with patients, namely, lab results in the context of Diabetes type 2 and other cardiovascular risk factors,” explains Ana Luísa Neves, researcher of the group PrimeCare: Primary Health Care Research, of the Thematic Line 1 – Preventive Health & Societal Challenges.
“Improved patient knowledge of their clinical data can increase their knowledge of their health, as well as their ability to manage it properly,” said the researcher. However, she underlines that there is a gap between the foreseeable benefits and the benefits that are actually scientifically demonstrated.
Thanks to the systematic and reproducible strategy now proposed by the Portuguese researcher, it will finally be possible to characterize the interventions of electronic health data sharing with the patients implemented so far, and to describe their impact in several dimensions, including patient centrality, efficacy, security, efficiency, opportunity and equity.
Centrality in patients includes measures related to the experience reported by the patients themselves. Effectiveness refers to health outcomes (e.g., blood pressure or HbA1c control in Diabetes), while efficiency refers to measures of an economic nature, such as the impact on the number of visits. Safety reflects data such as discrepancies in medication, while opportunity refers to time measures such as waiting list reduction. Finally, equity integrates measures that assess discrepancies between patient groups.
For Ana Luísa Neves, it is necessary to go even further and “map” the contribution of the interventions with the sharing of electronic health records in the short, medium and long term. “The implementation of these interventions has matured worldwide. Now is the time to assess their real impact, so that we can learn from what has been done, and generate robust evidence to support health policy decisions,” she concludes.