Patient perceptions of carrying their own health information: approaches towards responsibility and playing an active role in their own health - implications for a patient-held health file.

Objective: To elicit patients' views on whether they could contribute to improvements in their care by carrying their own health information to clinician encounters; and to consider the implications for the development of a patient-held health file (PHF).

Background: Increasing rates of chronic disease lead to health care being delivered by multiple care providers often at distributed geographic locations. As a way of increasing the availability of patient information to care providers our project will trial a PHF.