Patients skeptical of IT benefits, but demand providers take more data

Stories about hacking and the perception that healthcare providers aren’t providing adequate data security have led patients to distrust health IT.

According to a new survey of more than 12,000 people conducted by Black Book Market Research, 89 percent said they didn’t divulge health information to providers over privacy concerns in 2016. The number of patients unwilling to have their electronic health records (EHRs) be available beyond their physician and hospital rose to 87 percent in the most recent survey, up from 66 percent in 2013.

This distrust could have significant consequences on interoperability efforts and coordinating care across the healthcare system.

“Incomplete medical histories and undisclosed conditions, treatment or medications raises obvious concerns on the reliability and usefulness of patient health data in application of risk based analytics, care plans, modeling, payment reforms and population health programming,” said Black Book President Douglas Brown. “This revelation should force cybersecurity solutions to the top of the technology priorities in 2017 to achieve tangible trust in big data dependability.”

The survey results considered it “especially alarming” that so many respondents believe their mental health notes (99 percent), prescriptions (90 percent) and chronic condition data (81 percent) are being shared by their provider and insurance companies, without their consent, to retailers, employers and the federal government.

The blame, according to patients, fell on providers, with 84 percent saying their trust is based on how the provider uses health IT, while only 5 percent of consumers “had any issue in trusting in the actual technology.”

That lack of trust, however, contrasted with patients’ desires to have more access to their information and have data from personal fitness trackers incorporated into their medical records. Some 91 percent of consumers who use wearables believe EHRs should be able to store that data, while 94 percent of physicians said that data would be “overwhelming, redundant and unlikely to make a clinical difference.”

“In this age of healthcare consumerism people want to receive care through technologically enabled alternatives like telemedicine visits, secure email communications with their practitioner and immediate access to records and scheduling,” Brown said.