Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, one of the pilot sites for the successful OpenNotes project, is launching a study called OurNotes to test the concept of having patients add to and update their own electronic medical records.
Using a $450,000 grant from the Commonwealth Fund, the medical center will collaborate with its original OpenNotes study partners, the Geisinger Health System of Danville, Pennsylvania, and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington. Also included in the project are two other organizations that use OpenNotes: Seattle’s Group Health Cooperative and Mosaic Life Care in St. Joseph, Missouri.
During the last 5 years, OpenNotes, an approach to giving patients access to their physicians’ visit notes, has spread rapidly across the country and is now used by more than 5 million people.
In a news release, Jan Walker, RN, MBA, a cofounder of OpenNotes and principal investigator of the Commonwealth Fund grant, said she viewed OurNotes as an extension of the note-sharing program, which has been shown to increase patient engagement and improve adherence to medications. However, Walker, who works in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s general internal medicine and primary care department and is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, told Medscape Medical News that the patients in the OurNotes pilots will also have access to other parts of their medical records, such as problem and medication lists.
Read Ken Terry’s article here!
