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OpenNotes is a national initiative that urges medical practitioners to allow patients access to their visit notes. This change in practice, according to research, represents a key step toward greater transparency in healthcare.
“OpenNotes aligns with Cambia Health Foundation’s mission to make the health care system more person-focused, and proves the power of funders coming together to support a game-changing movement in which patients can instantly become active participants in all of their health care delivery,” said Steven Lesky, a program officer with Cambia Health Foundation which is one of the foundations partnering on OpenNotes.
The results of OpenNotes thus far, involving 100 primary care doctors and 20,000 of their patients, was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Since then 5 million Americans have participated in OpenNotes. At the end of the “trial,” those who read their medical notes reported feeling more in control of their care. They also reported having better recall, knowledge, and understanding their medical conditions.
“Health outcomes, cost of care, patient experience and clinician satisfaction are all important indicators of whether the healthcare system is performing well, and we believe that OpenNotes can improve the system on all those measures,” said Jeffrey Selberg, Executive Director of the Peterson Center on Healthcare. “Learning how OpenNotes spreads to 50 million patients will also help as we seek to spread and scale other innovations that improve the system along these measures.”
Also primarily funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, OpenNotes began in 2010. More than two-thirds of the participating patients who took medications during the original study reported improving the way they took their medications.
By The Numbers
25.1
percent
of Latinos remain without health insurance coverage
