Elderly patients may be willing to let family members access their medical records and make decisions on their behalf, but they also want to retain granular control of their health information, a study suggests.

“Respecting and preserving the autonomy of the elder is critical,” said lead author Bradley H. Crotty, MD, MPH, director of patient portals in the division of clinical informatics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an instructor at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Elders and families should have honest discussions about preferences for information sharing and decision-making, and share these conversations with health care providers.”

To understand how patients over age 75 and the family members who care for them think about sharing medical information, Dr. Crotty and colleagues held separate focus groups in 2013 and 2014 with 30 elders and 23 caregivers.

The elderly participants came from different residential settings—including assisted living and skilled nursing facilities—run by Hebrew Senior Life, an academic health care organization affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

Caregivers were adult children, spouses, or other relatives of residents, and they didn’t have to related to the elderly subjects in the study.

The majority of study participants were white. Most residents and caregivers in the study were women and had college or graduate degrees.

Most of the elderly patients were older than 81. A third of them rarely, if ever, used the internet, while 60 percent went online daily or almost every day.

Many differences of opinion emerged as the two groups talked about sharing access to the elderly patients’ health records, the researchers reported online July 6 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Caregivers felt that having information would decrease their stress, but patients wished to maintain control of the information to avoid burdening their children or loved ones with their illnesses and problems.

Many family members also thought having access to elderly patients’ records would make it easier for them to help coordinate care, appointments and communications with the rest of the family. But patients worried that this access would cause anxiety in their children.

The more independent elderly patients didn’t like the idea of losing control of their decision-making abilities and having to rely on their children. They were willing to share information, but reluctant to cede control of the information flow or give up the ability to make their own choices about treatment.

If they did have to give up control, elderly patients wanted this to happen gradually, starting perhaps by only sharing information in an emergency rather than as a routine on a day-to-day basis.