In a classic “Seinfeld” episode, Elaine Benes learns that her medical chart says she is “difficult” because she refused to wear a paper exam gown. Her efforts to resolve the situation aggravate doctors, leaving her with an untreated rash. In the real world, where medical charts are increasingly electronic, some providers have started sharing doctor notes with patients.…
OpenNotes in the Media
Dr. Tom Delbanco on The Diane Rehm Show: New Efforts to Make Doctors’ Notes Easily Accessible to Patients
Listen to Dr. Tom Delbanco and a panel of clinicians and consumers discuss OpenNotes on the Diane Rehm Show. By law, most patients have the right to access their medical records. But obtaining them can be time-consuming and expensive. A growing number of health advocates are pushing to give patients easy electronic access to physicians’…
Washington Post: Pilot at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess gives patients electronic access to therapists’ notes
For years, the woman went to a Boston hospital to talk to a therapist about being depressed and overweight. The therapist, listening closely, asked questions and jotted down notes on a memo pad. Until recently, the 54-year-old woman didn’t know what her therapist was writing. Then, last month, her therapist offered to share his notes…
The Healthcare Blog: Is Sharing Mental Health Notes with Patients a Good Idea?
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…
We Can Do Better: Northwest patients to gain easy access to clinicians’ notes
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…
Boston Globe: Doctors’ notes on mental health shared with patients
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.…
Making Mental Health Notes Available to Patients
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…
OpenNotes: Putting Medical Record Transparency to the Test
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…
BMJ: Access to health records- patients first
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…
Milwaukee Magazine: The Doctor Will Write You Now
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…
