Electronic Health Records (EHR) have become a core utility in health management in last decades. In this post, Peter Elias discusses how EHR can be changed in order to place people in the center of EHR.

According to Elias, patient-centered EHR would have the following main characteristics:

• The basic unit would be one record per patient, and patient would have direct acces to his EHR.
• Open source would be a core value in the development of patient-centered EHR.
• Patient would have the control of his own EHR, being able to control who can see, change or use the information contained in his EHR.
• Clinicians could enter the patient’s EHR in multiple ways, using their propietary owned  system or using a straightforward system to access multiple individual EHR.

Currently, we have professional-centered EHR; this proposal is a first step in the search for alternatives in order to achieve an EHR more useful, secure and efficient to deliver integrated and patient-centered care.