Since HIPAA was first enacted into law in 1996, patients have had the legal right to read and even amend their own medical records. HIPAA protects patient privacy but it also heightens patient engagement. As a result, the opportunity now exists to have more informed patients than ever before in the United States. This can lead to better patient care. It's the old adage: Information is power.

At RSNA 2012, however, some respected healthcare insiders recently questioned the utility of providing patients direct access to their own set of medical images and recent radiology reports. Their fear is that images may raise a thousand words of questions on the part of the patient, which may often lead to needless anxiety. If a back-and-forth between the doctor and patient becomes too prolonged, proper diagnosis and care may be delayed.

I disagree. Through my dealings with the clients that Merge serves every day, I believe that a patient's direct access to his or her own images is absolutely critical to more patient-centric healthcare. We can never forget that the image is the centerpiece to the EMR. Armed with a visual history, each patient becomes an active participant and in fact a true partner in medical decision-making. They have more control and receive improved continuity of care. Furthermore, the elimination of redundant tests due to lost images can result in significant cost savings.

If patient images were located in a central repository like a cloud that patients could access whenever and wherever they needed them, it would certainly make for more efficient care, and would improve processes in the health setting dramatically. The cloud is already in use for so many services that make life easier today. Why not healthcare?

The consensus among our clients is that even today, with all the great strides made in healthcare IT, the current system remains cumbersome, with too much potential for error. 

When an image takes more than 30 days to locate, best practices dictate that a repeat screening or other diagnostic procedures be performed. This further delays access to care and reinforces healthcare disparities  -  in addition to creating unnecessary costs. So many patients continue to get additional imaging because they don't have access to the images within their medical records. They may not even need these duplicate tests. What a waste of valuable resources, which already are extremely limited!

When patients can't remember if, when, or where they've had certain tests done in the past, the disparate radiology storage systems linked to a cloud or an image exchange can ideally "talk" to one another, find the patient's records and pull them from the vendor-neutral archive where a copy of the mammogram will be stored.

The result is a true collaborative approach to help improve the quality of healthcare. This is where the 21^st century is headed, and it's time for all stakeholders to embrace it. At the end of the day, this is a matter of whether we as a nation want to use available technological tools at our disposal to access information quickly, without any barriers. If patients already are allowed access to medical records, let's give them the complete picture.  There is absolutely no downside to this kind of patient access.