At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, therapists are giving mental health patients access to therapy notes and charts, something patients commonly have access to in other fields. The doctors behind the project say that opening mental health records up to patients allows for a more participatory, active, and collaborative therapy practice. Critics argue…
OpenNotes Pilot
New York Times: What the Therapist Thinks About You
David Baldwin wasn’t sure how he had come across the other day in group therapy at the hospital, near the co-op apartment where he lives with his rescue cat, Zoey. He struggles with bipolar disorder, severe anxiety and depression. Like so many patients, he secretly wondered what his therapist thought of him. But unlike those…
Washington Post: Pilot at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess gives patients electronic access to therapists’ notes
For years, the woman went to a Boston hospital to talk to a therapist about being depressed and overweight. The therapist, listening closely, asked questions and jotted down notes on a memo pad. Until recently, the 54-year-old woman didn’t know what her therapist was writing. Then, last month, her therapist offered to share his notes…
Boston Globe: Doctors’ notes on mental health shared with patients
Policy shift at Beth Israel Deaconess At the end of every workday, psychiatrists, social workers, and other mental health providers write notes describing their patients’ visits. It is where they chronicle paranoid behavior, excessive drinking, or relationship problems. These candid comments often are available to other doctors, but they are rarely shared with patients themselves.…
Making Mental Health Notes Available to Patients
BIDMC launches pilot, advocates for openness Writing for “A Piece of My Mind,” appearing April 2 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), lead author and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center psychiatrist, Michael Kahn, MD, urges mental health clinicians to begin sharing the visit notes they write with their patients. “Nationally, the momentum…
BMJ: Access to health records- patients first
Criticism of the government’s plan to collect data from patients’ medical records to build a new NHS database—care.data—has been fast and furious. With data collection postponed amid public concern about its confidentiality the government is now fielding advice on how to get its “busted” scheme right next time round. While the research potential of analysing “big data” has…
US News & World Report: OpenNotes Helps Keep Patients Informed and Engaged
In a classic “Seinfeld” moment from 1996, the character Elaine is waiting in the doctor’s office and peeks inside her medical chart, only to find that someone had written that she was “difficult.” The doctor walks in, grabs the file and tells Elaine, “You shouldn’t be reading that.” She questions him about that notation and…
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…
NEJM: The Road toward Fully Transparent Medical Records
“Forty years ago, Shenkin and Warner argued that giving patients their medical records ‘would lead to more appropriate utilization of physicians and a greater ability of patients to participate in their own care.’ At that time, patients in most states could obtain their records only through litigation, but the rules gradually changed, and in…
JMIR: OpenNotes & Patient Privacy
By Ashley Gold As touted by some patient advocates and medical professionals who want to give patients access to their data and doctors’ notes, online access to medical records for patients has the potential to improve care. But there’s always potential privacy loss to worry about, and a study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research on OpenNotes, an…
