by Barbara Sadick – posted first on The Wall Street Journal on February 26th 2018
With OurNotes, patients can see their doctors’ notes before appointments, as well as detail what they
want to talk about during their visit.
For the past six years, doctors across the country have been using an online system to share their medical notes with patients. Now researchers want to take the idea a step further—and let patients share their own notes with
doctors.
Under the new plan, called OurNotes, patients not only can see their doctors’ notes before appointments, but they can also correct mistakes, ask questions and let doctors know what they want to talk about during their visit. Doctors can then review what the patients wrote so they can spend less time asking questions and checking records during the session. Researchers say there are technical bugs to iron out, and both doctors and patients have to learn some nuances about communicating with each other. But they hope that eventually this new system will bring a big change in the management of health care.
“My dream: The patient will have more skin in the game, they’ll lift some burdens from exhausted doctors, and both will engage more actively and get more accomplished,” says Tom Delbanco, a faculty member of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who co-founded OurNotes with his colleague Jan Walker.
Read the full story on the Wall Street Journal website.
