Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, (BIDMC), a leader in the OpenNotes movement, is taking patient engagement one step further with a new grant that will explore the notion of letting patients actively contribute to their EHR documentation. With a $450,000 grant from The Commonwealth Fund, BIDMC and a team of partner organizations will develop OurNotes as a way to allow patients to put their own stamp on their primary care medical records and involve them more deeply in care decisions.
“We know that increasing patient engagement is a critical component of improving health care, and we hope to build on BIDMC’s well-established work in this area,” said Anne-Marie Audet, MD, Vice President at The Commonwealth Fund. “This research will explore the potential for OurNotes to help improve care among the most medically complex patients–those with multiple chronic health conditions.”
“This is really building for the future. We envision the potential capability of OurNotes to range from allowing patients to, for example, add a list of topics or questions they’d like to cover during an upcoming visit, creating efficiency in that visit, to inviting patient to review and sign off on notes after a visit as way to ensure that patients and clinicians are on the same page,” added principal investigator Jan Walker, RN, MBA, Division of General Medicine and Primary Care at BIDMC and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
OpenNotes has been one of the most successful ways to allow patients to become more actively engaged in their care, and has seen high levels of acceptance from patients and physicians alike.
Read Jennifer Bresnick’s full article on EHR-Intelligence.
