Perched on an exam table at the doctor’s office watching the clinician type details about their medical problems into their file, what patient hasn’t wondered exactly what the doctor is writing? As many as 50 million patients may have a chance to find out in the next few years, following the announcement this week of $10 million in new grants to expand the OpenNotes project, which works with medical providers to expand patient access to clinician notes.
OpenNotes started in 2010 as a research project to examine what would happen if patients had easy access to their doctor’s visit notes, which may include a summary of their conversation, the symptoms patients describe and their doctor’s findings from a physical exam. Although patients have a legal right to their medical records, getting those documents is often difficult and expensive. In that experiment, 100 primary care doctors volunteered to open up their notes to 20,000 of their patients at three medical institutions: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Read Michelle Andrews’s full article here.
