As the OpenNotes movement continues to grow, a broad variety of journalists, patients and health care professionals are taking note. Even better, they’re sharing the facts, data, opinions and experiences of those sharing medical notes. See what the buzz is all about.
Would allowing patients to read their mental health notes provide more benefits than risks? In a recent article in JAMA my colleagues and I argue that it would. While transparent medical records are gaining favor in primary care settings throughout the country through the OpenNotes initiative, there has been reluctance to allow patients to see what their…
Regional collaboration spurs first widespread adoption of the OpenNotes initiative Portland, Ore. – A unique regional collaboration among nine prominent health systems and medical groups in the Northwest will provide more than one million patients in Oregon and Southwest Washington with electronic access to the notes their providers include in medical records. This marks the first…
Policy shift at Beth Israel Deaconess At the end of every workday, psychiatrists, social workers, and other mental health providers write notes describing their patients’ visits. It is where they chronicle paranoid behavior, excessive drinking, or relationship problems. These candid comments often are available to other doctors, but they are rarely shared with patients themselves.…
BIDMC launches pilot, advocates for openness Writing for “A Piece of My Mind,” appearing April 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), lead author and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center psychiatrist, Michael Kahn, MD, urges mental health clinicians to begin sharing the visit notes they write with their patients. “Nationally, the momentum…
On April 8, we will hit a new milestone with the number of patients across the country who will soon have access to the medical notes written by their clinicians. Help us make open notes the norm by joining our first Thunderclap! Thunderclap is a great tool that allows us all to share a message on social…
Many health experts see “consumer engagement” as a key to improving quality and lowering costs. But how to get people to be more actively involved in their own care has vexed these same experts for years. Computers have unquestionably made things easier by enabling individuals, with a few clicks, to delve deeply into whatever health…
Criticism of the government’s plan to collect data from patients’ medical records to build a new NHS database—care.data—has been fast and furious. With data collection postponed amid public concern about its confidentiality the government is now fielding advice on how to get its “busted” scheme right next time round. While the research potential of analysing “big data” has…
Thanks to the computerization of medical records, the illegible scrawl of your doctor is mostly a thing of the past. Soon to be gone, too, might be the misunderstandings some patients have after they leave the doctor’s office – thanks to an initiative called OpenNotes. Pioneered in Wisconsin by the Columbia St. Mary’s health care…
