WASHINGTON, DC – The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and OpenNotes announced a formal collaboration today during AMIA’s 2017 Annual Symposium. The agreement will further a nationwide movement to offer patients easy access to their clinical notes.
“The evidence-base is clear: providing patients access to their physician’s notes improves physician-patient communication and trust, patient safety, and perhaps even patient outcomes,” said Thomas Payne, MD, FACP, FACMI, AMIA Board Chair and Medical Director of IT Services at the University of Washington’s UW Medicine. “AMIA is delighted to support OpenNotes towards its goal of making online access to notes the standard of care.”
“AMIA is a national leader in teaching us how to use digital platforms to accelerate healthcare transformation. We’re excited to partner with this community as the OpenNotes movement works to improve engagement, support shared decision making, and enhance the patient experience,” said Homer Chin, MD, MS, OpenNotes Electronic Health Record Expert.
While patients already have the legal right to review their records, the process of gaining access is often difficult. OpenNotes is an international movement dedicated to making that process easier by encouraging doctors, nurses, therapists, and others to share visit notes with patients online, through secure, patient portals. The overarching goal for OpenNotes is to empower patients, families, and caregivers to feel more in control of their health care decisions, and to improve both safety and healthcare value.
The collaboration will build on a shared vision that patients and families should be empowered through access to and control over their health data. As part of six Policy Principles and Positions developed in 2016 and 2017, AMIA stated that “Policies, programs, research, and care delivery should seek to empower patients through access to, and control of, their personal health information.” Numerous AMIA member organizations are already participating in OpenNotes, and the informatics community is a central part of the continued expansion of this effort.
“As evidenced by the more than 50 sessions focused on consumer and personal health informatics at AMIA’s 2017 Annual Symposium, it is clear this is the direction the industry should be heading,” said AMIA President and CEO Douglas H. Fridsma, MD, PhD, FACP, FACMI. “We’re proud to work alongside OpenNotes to put our principles into practice, and we look forward to finding innovative ways to advance this important movement.”
“AMIA’s commitment to involving patients, families, and caregivers in work to improve health care is terrific,” said Catherine M. DesRoches, DrPH, Executive Director of OpenNotes. “We look forward to working even more closely with an organization that believes health record transparency is a remarkably powerful way to effect change.”
