Information and data have value in every industry. The value of data in health care is only beginning to bloom. Who owns it, though?
Patients undoubtedly have rights with respect to their medical records. It goes unrecognized by most, however, that physicians own the value of data with their electronic charts.
Patients have rights to the content of the data within their medical records. The charts contain their personal information. This is unquestionable. However, value of data comes from its structure and the organization, which is fully dependent on the physician who generates and maintains the medical record.
The organization of a patient’s chart may vary from being a barely legible handwritten paper chart, to the other end of the spectrum of being a complex Electronic Medical Record (EMR) with advanced data structure. Across the spectrum, the exact same patient information (content), can have widely different functionality and analyzability (value). This quality differential is entirely dependent on the physician and there can be extreme differences when comparing the charts, and thus data quality, of one physician to another.
Governments covet the value of the aggregate, even anonymized, data within EMRs for planning and policy purposes. Pharmaceutical companies share a similar craving for the data for marketing and development purposes. Innumerable interest groups and organizations equally desire data that relates to their agendas. (The legalities and ethics of sharing or selling data are beyond the scope of this article. Rather, the intent of this article is to identify and raise awareness of the value of EMR data that physicians possess).
As per College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), “patients have a right of access to their personal health information that is in the custody or under the control of” a physician.1 Patients can request copies of their charts. Even if the original chart was in EMR format, though, what the patient is entitled to and receives is either a printed paper copy of the records, or an electronic PDF document saved on a CD or memory stick, for example. In these formats, the data has relatively nil to minimal value because it is not structured in a way that is easily navigated and analyzed.
Physicians, and staff hired by physicians, are the ones who input the notes and structure the data within their charts. Many physicians further build and customize tools within their EMRs to aid in the documentation. Physicians are the ones who pay for the the EMR software, training, and vendor support. Physicians are the ones who are responsible for funding all of the computer hardware, technical support, and the physical space in which to house the infrastructure. Accordingly, in every sense, physicians own their EMRs.
One might try to argue that part of the payment to physicians from Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) for their services includes the generation and maintenance of the medical record.2 However, OHIP simply mandates and includes payment for physicians to “keep and maintain appropriate medical records”.3 It specifies nothing with respect to a standard of quality. The CPSO has more specific requirements.1 However, even a legible and complete paper chart meets those standards of care. Anything above and beyond the minimum baseline of those requirements has value, and that value is derived from, and therefore owned by, the physician who generates and maintains that chart.
There is obvious variability with respect to the quality of data within physicians’ EMRs. The difference from one extreme to another highlights the differences in value of EMR data. Physicians own that value.
Patients have rights to the content of their individual data. Physicians own the organization, structure, functionality, and analyzability of the data. Physicians own their EMRs. It follows that physicians own the value of the aggregate data within their EMRs. These are careful and important distinctions.
– Dr. Adam Stewart
April 22, 2018
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