In a large-scale disaster, medical professionals need to access medication records and provide medicines to people who cannot return home to take their daily medicines. We investigated the proportion of carrying the paper notebook or availability of the smartphone application of the medication record among people who are assumed to have difficulty in taking their medicines during large-scale disasters.

In Japan, a web-based survey was conducted in 2018 by randomly selecting adults ≥ 20 years of age.

There were 2286 medication record owners in 3082 participants. Of the medication record owners, 784 (34.3%) took medicines that could not be missed for even a day. Among them, 724 used paper notebooks alone, 26 used smartphone applications alone, and 34 used both. Among the 724, 208 (28.8%) always carried a paper notebook. Among the 26, 16 (61.5%) could use their applications anytime. Therefore, among the 784, at least 560 (71.4%) could not always access their medication information.

An awareness campaign to carry paper notebooks and install applications for medication records should be held, since only a limited number of people carry their medication records and always have access to their medication information.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the utilisation of a web-based multimedia patient-accessible electronic health record, for patients with congenital cardiac disease.

This was a prospective analysis of patients undergoing congenital cardiac surgery at a single institution from 1 September, 2006 to 1 February, 2009. After meetings with hospital administration, physicians, nurses, and patients, we configured a subset of the cardiac program’s web-based clinical electronic health record for patient and family access. The Electronic Health Record continuously measured frequency and time of logins, logins during and between hospitalisations, and page views by type (imaging versus textual data).

Of the first 270 patients offered access to the system, 252 became users (93% adoption rate). System uptime was 99.9%, and no security breaches were reported. Users accessed the system more often while the patients were in hospital (67% of total logins) than after discharge (33% of total logins). The maximum number of logins by a family was 440, and the minimum was 1. The average number of logins per family was 25. Imaging data were viewed significantly more frequently than textual data (p ⩽0.001). A total of 12 patients died during the study period and 11 members of their families continued to access their Electronic Health Records after the date of death.

A web-based Patient Accessible Electronic Health Record was designed for patients with congenital cardiac disease. The adoption rate was high, and utilisation patterns suggest that the Electronic Health Record could become a useful tool for health information exchange.