MeD-Lights: A Usable Metaphor for Patient Controlled Access to Electronic Health Records

Electronic health records (EHR) are poised to replace paper-based medical health records—EHRs show the promise of improving medical care by providing immediate access to a patient’s records without having to worry about human-introduced delays. At the same time, mobile devices such as smartphones enable users to maintain their own medical in-formation such as personal health records (PHR) as well as control the dissemination and sharing of their EHRs with medical personnel. Deciding what records to share with which medical personnel, however, is complicated by the many different types of records and users ’ varying privacy preferences. Thus, a usable model is needed to allow users to control the sharing of EHRs. In this paper we describe and evaluate MeD-Lights, a model that leverages the metaphor of traffic light colors (red, yellow, and green) to portray sensitivity levels of records, and how they should be shared with medical personnel. We implemented a MeD-Lights application on the Android plat-form and performed a user study using smartphones and show that the semantics of sharing we attach to these colors are indeed intuitive to users and users can use them effec-tively to manage access to their EHRs