Keyose Blog - Personal Health Records

Two in five (42%) adults keep personal or family health records, that is “one place where you keep all your medical records with the results of all your medical tests and details about prescriptions, vaccinations, treatments, known allergies and other health care information.” Almost every one (84%) of those who do not keep health records think it would be a good idea to do so.

At the moment, only a small minority (13%) of those with health records keep them electronically but many people – 40% of all those who do not have electronic medical records – think it at least somewhat likely that they will do so.
These are a few of the results of a nationwide survey by Harris Interactive of 2,242 adults who were surveyed online between July 12 and 18, 2004.
Other interesting findings include:
• Women (45%) are slightly more likely than men (38%) to keep personal or family medical records.
• Older people are more likely than younger people to keep personal or family medical records. Fully 58% of people over 65 do so.
• Among the many “good reasons” for keeping personal or family medical records are:
- The ability to provide doctors with useful information (78%).
- The ability to look back and recall what care was received (78%).
- The ability to have access to the record in case of emergency (77%).
- To help ensure the proper use of prescription drugs (54%).

The biggest concerns people have about keeping medical records are possible threats to one’s privacy (68%), and security (66%). Many, but far fewer, people are concerned about possible errors (37%), that critical information won’t be accessible in an emergency (37%), or that they won’t be able to keep their records up to date (33%).

For that reason, privacy and security have been the main concern of Keyose’s team from the beginning of the project.