ABSTRACT
When it comes to healthcare, patients have a fundamental right to access and obtain a copy of their medical records. Any information contained in the medical record should be available to the patient. As per Dr. Peter Elias, “Nothing should go in the chart [medical record] that the patient does not know about” (Elias, 2016). Responding to critics that say medical records are filled with erroneous information and shouldn’t be provided to patients, Dr. Elias further suggests in another post that, “We need to make it easy for the patient to access the record so we can do a better job of making it accurate and usable” (Peter Elias, 2016). Patients rely on this information for many reasons such as monitoring their condition, assist themselves in the healing process, or fix errors that may be in their records.
