A randomized controlled trial of a patient-accessible electronic medical record

Legal and technologic trends are making medical records more patient-accessible. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) stipulates that "patients must be able to see and get copies of their records, and request amendments." Medical records are more commonly being stored in electronically, and methods have been developed to share these records with patients in a secure format.1,2 Previous studies of patient-accessible medical records generally only provided limited exposure to the medical record and lacked controls for bias and confounding.3 We performed a 12-month randomized controlled trial of a patient-accessible medical record to further assess the effects of such a program.