A woman has revealed how she found out she had lung cancer through an email link from her doctor, as she urges doctors to treat patients with more dignity.
Jamie Sweeney, 64, said she got teary-eyed when she received the panic attack-inducing news via a message on her iPad while she was 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 of tests performed on small lumps in her lungs days earlier.
“Terrified,” was how she described it to local reporters, “someone should have called me.” Gesturing to her disabled husband, she added: ‘What’s wrong? Who is going to take care of him?’
Ms. Sweeney is one of a growing number of Americans who receive devastating diagnoses before speaking to a doctor.
Jamie Sweeney, 64, of Ohio, said she got teary-eyed when she received the diagnosis via email. She appears in the photo above.
Now she worries about who will care for her husband, pictured above left, who is disabled after suffering a work accident.
A MyChart spokesperson said patients can turn off notifications, but there are fears that results could still be uploaded to online portals because hospitals must immediately share medical information, including cancer diagnoses, with patients.
Mrs. Sweeney revealed to Local 12 that he received the diagnosis after clicking on an email from MyChart, which showed his test results.
He immediately said he had a “growing adenocarcinoma” (or cancer) and needed a “multidisciplinary thoracic tumor board” or team of doctors to establish his treatment plan.
Mrs Sweeney, who had been living with benign spots on her lungs for years, said: ‘What did that mean to me? It sure meant I had cancer.’
She is one of two-thirds of Americans who use MyChart to access their medical records, which has been repeatedly criticized for sharing troubling diagnoses before doctors 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 haven’t 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 not available and she was worried that I had seen him.”
You received the email from MyChart, shown above. MyChart said patients can turn off notifications to avoid receiving distressing news.
And a third said: ‘I found out my biopsy results (inconclusive but still concerning) on MyChart and had a mild panic attack at work before I could talk to my (doctor) on the phone.’
A spokesperson for Wisconsin-based Epic, which owns MyChart, said patients and hospitals could configure the system to stop sending notifications.
“Each organization decides how to configure published results based on its 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, had no comment on the release of the results. DailyMail.com has also contacted them for comment.
The bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act, which took effect in 2021, requires hospitals to quickly share medical information with patients.
Three-quarters of doctors, particularly those who treat cancer patients, do not support the measure, saying it causes anxiety for patients and leads to complaints about how care is provided.
But activists say the law was necessary to ensure that medical systems did not act as “gatekeepers” of patient information.
Caitlin Donovan, a health policy expert at the National Patient Advocate Foundation, said: “Unfortunately, that means some patients are opening these messages and receiving terrible reports without having them interpreted by a doctor first.”
‘However, I will say that for a long time patients have been frustrated because they felt that the entire medical industry was acting as gatekeepers of their own information.
“Now, this law turns in the opposite direction, where there is almost no filter.”
According to data, around two million Americans are diagnosed with cancer in the US each year.
