Note-taking is an important piece of doctors' care for their patients. But it's uncommon for patients themselves to see the doctors' notes.
Jonathan Darer, chief innovation officer for the Geisinger Health System, says that even though doctors' notes belong to patients, it's often inconvenient for patients to access them. But that changed when 27 Geisinger physicians took part in a project called OpenNotes, in which doctors from three health care networks shared their notes with the people they treated.
Geisinger is based in the Central PA town of Danville and covers 44 counties in Pennsylvania. Its physicians who participated in OpenNotes were already using electronic medical records, so they didn't have to change much about how they interacted with patients. (Some made adjustments like jotting down “shortness of breath” instead of its abbreviation, “SOB.”) The notes were available to patients through a secure online portal.
The project started in the summer of 2010 and lasted for a year. Organizers are currently examining their findings. “The overall preliminary results seem to show that the patients love it and the doctors don't seem to mind,” Darer says. Some doctors feared that OpenNotes would add to their workloads, but that wasn't the case.
Over the next year or so, Geisinger plans to sign up as many of its doctors as it can to share their notes with patients. “This shows you can improve the quality of the patient experience without spending millions of dollars on new hospitals and medical facilities,” Darer says.
Source: Jonathan Darer, Geisinger Health System
Writer: Rebecca VanderMeulen