Transcript: Who owns electronic health information?
Here’s a written transcript of the Healthcare Town Hall video segment on ownership of electronic health records.
Q: Gail Graham, in the case of the V.A., who owns the patient records in your system?
Gail Graham: Well, by statute, V.A., as the custodian of the record. But the information is actually owned by the patient, and the control and the release of that information is owned by the patient. We do have legal parameters for how we keep it and the duration for which we keep it. But disclosures of that information are established in the Privacy Act and in HIPAA. And I think for us, too, our patients have a long history of maintaining a copy of their record that dates back to their military service. So even before provisions of HIPAA allowed for amendment and getting copies of your records, it was a very commonplace thing for the veterans to keep a copy of their medical record as they moved around.
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