Why it's a myth that patients have full access to their medical records

A Frustrating Detour No Patient Should Face

In 2019, a woman in California spent weeks trying to schedule follow-up treatment after surgery. Her surgeon's office told her they never received the hospital's operative notes, which she assumed would be instantly available through "electronic" health records. Instead, she drove across town, signed paperwork, and waited two weeks for a CD-ROM. Her story is not unusual. Even though 94% of U.S. medical records are managed by Epic, the largest healthcare software vendor, patients often find their information scattered across portals, providers, and systems.

The Myth of a Unified Digital Record

By 2021, 88.2% of office-based physicians used electronic health records, and 77.8% were on certified systems. On the surface, this sounds like near-universal digitization. In reality, the U.S. healthcare system operates on roughly 1,000 different EHR platforms, each with its own data formats, logins, and limitations.

Patients bear the brunt of this fragmentation. They juggle multiple portal logins, interpret wildly different interfaces, and manually combine information from one system's lab results with another's prescription list. A 2022 study found that only 15–30% of patients use even a single portal's features. Nearly 60% have two or more portal accounts that cannot exchange data.

Why Fragmentation Hurts

The impact is more than inconvenience. 72% of hospitals report struggling daily with incomplete patient information. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that 20–25% of U.S. healthcare spending, roughly $1 trillion annually, could be saved through better data utilization.

Solutions like FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) aim to change this by enabling secure, standardized data sharing via APIs. Federal rules now require providers to make health information available through FHIR-based access. Still, progress is slow due to legacy systems, competitive roadblocks, and ingrained workflows.

Sadly, a key reason for the slow pace of progress is that many patients have been led to believe in this myth: "I already have access to my patient records through MyChart".

What a Patient-First System Could Be

A truly patient-first approach would mean you never have to log into five different portals or hunt down paper records. Instead, all your medical records, wearable health metrics, and even self-reported symptoms would be stored in one private, secure place that you control. This is the model some modern platforms are building toward, quietly integrating data from multiple sources and presenting it in a way that is easy to access, understand, and act on.

What This Means for You as a Mediphant Customer

• Bring all your health data together - lab results, specialist notes, imaging reports, and wearable data, in one secure vault.
• Give you instant access to your complete health story whenever and wherever you need it.
• Protect your privacy with HIPAA-compliant infrastructure and patient-controlled sharing.
• Help you make better decisions faster by providing a single, consistent view of your health, instead of a patchwork of disconnected portals.

With Mediphant, you spend less time chasing your medical history and more time using it to improve your health.

Sources

• 1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "NEHRS: EHR adoption among U.S. physicians - 2021 report."
• 2. Wikipedia. "Electronic Health Record."
• 3. North, S., et al. "Patient portal use among adults: United States, 2022."
• 4. EHR in Practice. "Best EHR Patient Portals Comparison."
• 5. CapMinds. "72% of U.S. Hospitals Struggle with Patient Data Gaps."
• 6. Hello Health. "What Data Fragmentation Means for the Patient."
• 7. Wikipedia. "Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources."
• 8. Reuters. "Healthcare software giant Epic hit with lawsuit over U.S. patient records."