News by Subject Social & Behavior

Patients can face barriers when trying to obtain their medical records and a study of top-ranked US hospitals suggests noncompliance with federal and state regulations regarding certain aspects of medical records request processes and discrepancies in information provided to patients may contribute.

The ongoing transition to electronic health records may increase data breaches involving patient records. An analysis of reported breaches of health data from 2010 through 2017 found that except for 2015, the number of breach reports increased each year. During this time there were 2,149 breaches comprising a total of 176.4 million records. The most common entity breached was a health care provider, with 1,503 breaches (70 percent) compromising a total of 37.1 million records.

With over three-quarters of Americans now owning a smartphone, healthcare researchers have speculated that the number of patients recording visits with their doctor was increasing. A new study by researchers from The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice is the first to measure the prevalence of recording of clinical visits in the United States. The study also assesses the attitudes of doctors and the public toward recording, and surveys 49 large health systems.

Annals of Family Medicine is a peer-reviewed, indexed research journal that provides a cross-disciplinary forum for new, evidence-based information affecting the primary care disciplines.

The breakneck pace of biomedical discovery is outstripping clinicians' ability to incorporate this new knowledge into practice. Charles Friedman, Ph.D. and his colleagues recently wrote an article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine about a possible way to approach this problem, one that will accelerate the movement of newly-generated evidence about the management of health and disease into practice that improves the health of patients.

A substantial proportion of pharmaceutical industry payments to authors of oncology clinical trials published in major scientific journals are not disclosed, new research shows.

Using fMRI data, researchers found that the brain activity of people who don't frequently read the news better predicted the popularity of New York Times Health articles. Frequent readers, by contrast, responded positively to all articles. When seeking to have content go viral, say the authors, look beyond the most committed readers or advocates.