Improving After-Visit Summaries: Ensuring Patient-Centeredness and Improving Use

​Two recent papers funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) examine potential ways of improving after-visit summaries to increase their value to patients and healthcare practitioners while protecting patients' privacy and ensuring information accuracy. The first, published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, found that patients value the after-visit summary as "useful for sharing with family or clinicians even if they had access to their health records via web portals." However, patients did point to several areas that were confusing, such as the multiple medication lists (started, stopped, and modified medication regimens).