By Jan Walker, RN, MBA Tom and I began working together in the early 1990’s. Tom had already been causing a stir. He had started one of the first hospital-based primary care teaching practices at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and was constantly examining ways to improve quality in care. Deep down in there,…
News from OpenNotes
New OpenNotes video!!
When Linda Johnson had a significant health scare away from her home in Seattle, she shared her medical notes from Dr. Sara Jackson and her care team at Harborview Medical Center, both with her daughter and the Baltimore hospital’s team that took care of her. Linda’s long term plan going forward is to involve her family…
Mental Health Notes Empower Patients
About a year and a half ago, longtime BIDMC patient Stacey Whiteman received shocking news from her physician. “I have Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in my brain and in my spine,” she said. “Cognitively I am challenged. I can’t multitask anymore. I may look okay on the outside but on the inside, it is challenging, to…
Wall Street Journal: Health-Care Providers Want Patients to Read Medical Records, Spot Errors
Health-care providers are giving patients more access to their medical records so they can help spot and correct errors and omissions. Studies show errors can occur on as many as 95% of the medication lists found in patient medical records. Errors include outdated data and omissions that many patients could readily identify, including prescription drugs…
Join Us! Help make @MyOpenNotes the Norm!
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…
Partnering with Caregivers
by Jon Darer, MD, MPH, Chief Innovation Officer for the Division of Clinical Innovation for Geisinger Health System Recently, I attended a family caregiver summit in Washington, DC, sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, Booz Allen Hamilton, America’s Health Insurance Plans, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Intel-GE Care Innovations and UnitedHealthcare. The summit focused on an issue many of us…
Open Notes: A New Resource for Nurses
By Jan Walker RN, MBA, Suzanne Leveille RN, PhD, and Melissa Anselmo, MPH If we truly want patients to engage with clinicians about their health and care, we need to provide them with full and easy access to records that traditionally have been off limits. OpenNotes is a national movement that encourages clinicians—including nurses—to invite patients…
Geisinger Expands OpenNotes
More than 168,000 Geisinger Health System (GHS) patients have access to their doctors’ notes for the first time through the secure MyGeisinger online patient portal. Geisinger expanded OpenNotes in May 2013 due to the initiative’s overwhelming success. As of November 2013, the expansion of OpenNotes now includes more than 1,000 Geisinger clinicians, encompassing all of…
Interval Examination: Moving Toward OpenNotes
By Jan Walker, RN, MBA & Tom Delbanco, MD, MACP Despite periodic efforts over almost 5 decades, the idea of having patients review and contribute to their medical records has failed to take hold, even though such practice might engage patients more actively in maintaining their health and managing their care and might also improve…
The Health Care Blog: OpenNotes: Drilling Down to Assure a Healthy Evolution
As the instigators of the OpenNotes initiative, we are thrilled that OpenNotes is being adopted by the VA. Prompted by Dr. Kernisan’s thoughtful post , the ensuing lively discussion, and our experiment with 100 primary care physicians and 20,000 of their patients), we thought it useful to offer some observations drawing both on our experiences as clinicians and on…