When you go in for your annual physical, the doctor sits by your side and scans a thick chart filled with a record of your office visits, test results and any medicine you’re taking.

It’s your entire medical history, but it has been kept in your doctor’s hands — until now.

The Buffalo Medical Group, the largest physician group practice in the area, has started a pilot program that provides patient access to health records and is believed to be the first of its kind locally.

Using MyChart, patients can see their medical records over the Internet, immediately get lab results, seek prescription refills, make appointments and quickly get questions answered.

“It’s kind of a peek into the secret little chart that you never get to see,” said Timothy M. Creenan, chief executive officer of Amherst Alarm and a medical group patient, who has used MyChart since last year.

Also, officials say, the MyChart system is useful during public health emergencies because they can contact patients electronically to swiftly get the best information to them.

“The technology is such that it’s an amazing new way to proactively reach out to patients, as well as to have them proactively reach out to us,” said Dr. Irene S. Snow, medical director of the Buffalo Medical Group.

MyChart-type systems build off the growing use of electronic medical records in this country.

Experts see a future of increased portability and accessibility, when patient and doctor will be able to view a medical history at any time, through the Web or a microchip on a card, but key questions must be addressed.

“We’ve got to give patients a lot of informational rights, and full confidentiality and privacy that they have now and control of their record,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.

The federal and state governments are prodding health care providers to convert to electronic health records.

Government regulators and health care officials believe that storing medical records in a digital format can boost efficiency, cut down on errors and improve the quality of care.

Computerizing these records will give physicians the ability to sort through reams of medical data to find patterns and help determine the best courses of treatment.

When a new patient comes into a clinic, the doctor can quickly pull up data from every other patient of a similar gender, age and lifestyle habit and follow the recommendations of the system to order certain tests and procedures, such as people who are in need of a colonoscopy, said Dr. Raul Vazquez of the Urban Family Practice.

“You can really look at the data and crunch it and see where changes can have a benefit in patient care,” said Vazquez, who digitized the records of his West Side practice in 1998.

Locally, about 25 to 30 percent of providers have converted to electronic health records, or EHRs, said Daniel E. Porreca, the executive director of HEALTHeLINK, a local consortium working on a system of electronically shared health data.

Programs such as MyChart, providing online access to electronic health records, make these records even more useful for patients and doctors alike.

The Buffalo Medical Group began offering this service as a pilot program for primary-care patients insured mainly through Independent Health.

The group went to electronic medical records for its physicians beginning in March 2007 and started offering My- Chart to the select group of patients late last summer, Snow said. About 6,000 patients have signed up for it.

It cost the Buffalo Medical Group about $50,000 to digitize records for each physician, and providing the My- Chart feature on top of that costs 20 cents per patient per month, said Dr. John C. Notaro, the group’s associate medical director.

Buffalo Medical Group officials say giving patients access to their medical records helps them play a greater role in managing their own health.

There’s a gain in efficiency, doctors said, because patients can do more with less phone contact with the office and with less time spent waiting for help.

“It’s an important shift in how patients and physicians interact,” said Dr. Thomas J. Foels, the Independent Health medical director.

Foels noted that patients rarely have access to their records and that they often are left in limbo after having lab work done. “Wouldn’t you rather know, one way or another, in the shortest period of time?” he asked.

Online records also provide a two-way flow of information. The medical group, for example, sent advisories to MyChart users during the swine flu scare.

In interviews, patients said they liked MyChart’s convenience.

“This, to me, is unbelievable. I wish every single doctor I dealt with had this. I can’t imagine how great my health care could be,” said Leslie Meier, an East Amherst resident and Buffalo Medical Group patient who has used MyChart since last August to make appointments and get prescriptions refilled.

Patients also can see a list of lab results, medications, allergy histories, immunizations and doctors’ appointments.

It’s important to put the raw medical data into an understandable context, and to offer patients an opportunity to ask questions. Patients who use My- Chart say they had little trouble processing lab results and other records, and doctors responded quickly to inquiries.

“This is so simple for me,” said Anne Marie Kulczyk, a retiree and snowbird from Orchard Park who liked being able to access her account information while she was in Florida.

Programs such as MyChart are known as patient portals, and they tend to provide access to information collected by and through one doctor’s office.

Other companies, including Google and Microsoft, are setting up personal health records. These rely on the patient pulling together health data from a variety of sources to create a more comprehensive Web-based health history.

The vision for electronic health records is to make them portable and interoperable, which means the various programs can interact.

“It eliminates the paper. It allows the information to flow electronically between the two offices,” Porreca said. “It would cut down on errors. It would improve quality because they can be confident in the information they receive.”

Electronic records are a good idea, Dixon said, but steps must be taken to ensure that patients can correct inaccurate information.

With Buffalo Medical Group’s My- Chart, only patients can see their medical records, which are password-protected, unless a patient gives permission for a proxy to have access.

The Buffalo Medical Group also wrestled with the question of how to deal with the records of adolescent patients. It decided that parents can have online access to the records of patients who are younger than 12, Snow said, but not to those of patients 12 to 18.

Overall, Porreca said, “people are savvy about technology, and more and more, they want to play an active role in their own care.”