Health information technology, including health information exchange, offers the potential to improve care by providing an integrated view of relevant, integrated patient information from multiple health care providers practicing in multiple sites. However, realizing that potential can be difficult, particularly with respect sensitive information. Increasingly, patients, patient advocate groups, and even the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology are pushing for patients to have more granular control over specifically who can see what personal health information in their electronic health records.

This will be a demonstration project aimed at showing the initial feasibility a system allowing patient controls on their electronic health records. Because of the exploratory nature of the research, the investigators do not have specific hypotheses. The investigators hope that this demonstration and feasibility project will lead to more extensive prospective evaluations of patient control of access to their health records and other tools for enhancing patient control over access to their health records.

In 2010, ONC launched a Challenge Grant program that called for proposals for "enabling enhanced query for patient care." Under this program, the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University developed a Web-based program for patients' to express their preferences for who can access data in their electronic health records (EHR). It then applied these preferences by modifying an existing EHR viewer called Careweb® that is used by the Indiana Network for Patient Care and Eskenazi Health, an urban public health system in Indianapolis.

This study:

1. Produced a bioethical report on "points to consider" to inform electronic health record designers concerning giving patients granular control over access to their health data.
2. Interviewed patients to assess their desires for granular level of control over which personal health information should be shared, with whom, and for what purpose, and whether those preferences vary depending on the sensitivity of patients' health information.
3. Developed a Web-based patient-centered user interface that allows them to choose whether to provide or restrict access to their health information, focusing on who (health care providers and non-providers), what information (all, none, sensitive information only), and when (periods of time in their lives during which they desire restricting access to their health information) .
4. Reprogrammed the user interface of Careweb®, a data viewing system used by clinicians in Eskenazi Health, the third largest safety net health system in the U.S., and the Indiana Network for Patient Care, the oldest, largest, and most comprehensive health information exchange in the country. The reprogrammed viewer interface allows patients' preferences to control who sees what information in a patient's electronic health record.
5. Performed a demonstration study among 32 health care providers (9 physicians and 23 clinical staff) and 105 patients in an inner city primary care practice where patients recorded their preferences concerning who could access what information in their electronic health records, and then implemented those preferences during a 6-month real-world study in Eskenazi Health.

Inclusion Criteria:

For Patients:

• all adults 18 years or older who were fluent in English and had visited the study primary care clinic at least twice in the previous year

For Providers:

• all personnel of all types practicing in General Medicine Clinic, both Firms A and B, on the 4th floor of Wishard's Primary Care Center. For those physicians who agree to participate, attempted to recruit 10 patients who had visited their primary care physician at least twice in the previous 1 year.

Exclusion Criteria:

• will be lack of English fluency and inability to communicate due to physiologic or cognitive difficulties.

Primary Care Clinic

Data collected from enrolled patients was limited to gender, race/ethnicity, age, and whether they had highly sensitive information (as defined in Methods) in their electronic health records. This information was obtained from patients' electronic medical records only.

6 months

Patient complaints

We could not separate the anonymous post-study provider survey results and comments by provider type because the numbers within the physicians and nurses were sufficiently small that anonymity could have been lost.