Access to personal health records—why is progress so slow?

As part of its Patient and Public Partnership Strategy, The BMJ is shining a spotlight on the barriers and challenges to enabling better access to personal health records. The BMJ ’s patient editors start to unpick why progress has been so slow, and how to speed it up. Accessing data about ourselves, for the most part, has never been easier. Personal data on our finances, our Twitter account, Facebook page, phone network, stocks and shares, browsing habits, broadband consumption... even the number of steps we take and the minutes’ sleep we get, can now be logged and accessed. There is barely a corner of our lives left untouched by the data revolution. The move to more data has also been seen in healthcare. This is particularly true in long term conditions like type 1 diabetes (T1D), where the amount of data available to patients has increased dramatically over the past 10 years. This has altered …