In both Europe and North America, patients are beginning to gain access to their health records in electronic form. Using the open source cityEHR as an example, we have focussed on the needs of clinical users to gather requirements for patient access and have implemented these requirements in a new application called cityEHR-PA. The development of a separate application for patient access was necessary to address requirements for security and ease of use. The use of open standards throughout the design of the EHR allows the possibility of third parties to develop applications for patient access, consuming the individual patient record extracted from the full EHR.