A woman has revealed how she learned she had lung cancer via an email link from her doctor — as she urges physicians to treat patients with more dignity.
Jamie Sweeney, 64, said her eyes filled with tears when she received the panic attack-inducing news via a message on her iPad while at home in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The link took her to a page on MyChart, an online system for accessing medical records, that revealed the results from tests on small lumps in her lungs days earlier.
‘Terrified,’ is how she described it to local news reporters, ‘someone should have called me’. Gesturing to her disabled husband, she added: ‘What happens to him? Who’s going to take care of him?’.
Ms Sweeney is one of a growing number of Americans receiving devastating diagnoses before speaking to a doctor.
Jamie Sweeney, 64, from Ohio, said her eyes filled with tears when she received the diagnosis via an email. She is pictured above
She is now worried about who is going to care for her husband, pictured left above, who is disabled after suffering from a workplace accident
A spokesperson for MyChart said patients can turn off notifications, but there are fears that results can still be uploaded to online portals because hospitals are required to immediately share medical information, including cancer diagnoses, with patients.
Ms Sweeney revealed to Local 12 that she received the diagnosis after clicking on an email from MyChart, which brought up her test results.
It immediately said that she had a ‘growing adenocarcinoma’ — or cancer — and needed a ‘multidisciplinary thoracic tumor board’ — or team of doctors to establish her treatment plan.
Ms Sweeney, who had been living with benign spots on her lungs for years, said: ‘What did that mean to me? It meant for sure I have cancer.’
She is one of two-thirds of Americanas who use MyChart to access their medical records, which has been repeatedly blasted for sharing disturbing diagnoses before doctors have managed to contact patients.
One woman wrote on Reddit just six days ago: ‘I checked my online account [MyChart] today and the results were there. I had papillary carcinoma [thyroid cancer]. I have not even received a call from my doctor yet.’
A second said: ‘I found out the same way. I got an email saying MyChart was updated so I looked.
‘An hour later a nurse called me because my doctor was out and unavailable and she was worried I would have seen it.’
She received the email from MyChart, pictured above. MyChart said patients can turn off notifications in order to avoid receiving distressing news
And a third said: ‘I learned about my (inconclusive but still worrisome) biopsy results in MyChart and had a mild panic attack at work before I could get my [doctor] on the phone.’
A spokesperson for Wisconsin-based Epic, which owns MyChart, said patients and hospitals could set the system to stop it sending notifications.
‘Each organization decides how to configure results released based on their specific needs,’ they said.
‘MyChart allows patients to choose whether they want to see their results automatically or wait until their care team has reviewed them.’
UC Health outside Cincinnati, where Ms Sweeney was receiving treatment, did not comment on the results release. DailyMail.com has also contacted them for comment.
The bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act, which came into force in 2021, requires hospoitals to rapidly share medical information with patients.
Three quarters of doctors, particularly those treating cancer patients, do not support the measure — saying it causes anxiety to patients and triggers complaints about how care is delivered.
But campaigners say the law was necessary to ensure that medical systems wouldn’t act as ‘gatekeepers’ on patient’s information.
Caitlin Donovan, a healthcare policy expert at the National Patient Advocate Foundation, said: ‘Unfortunately, that means that some patients are opening up these messages and receiving terrible reports without having a doctor interpret it for them first.
‘I will say though, for patients, for a long time, patients have been frustrated because they felt like the entire medical industry was acting as gatekeepers to their own information.
‘Now, this law swings the other way to where there’s almost no filter.’
About two million Americans are diagnosed with cancer in the US every year, data shows.
