Nine prominent health systems and medical groups in the Northwest provide more than one million patients in Oregon and Southwest Washington electronic access to the notes that their providers include in medical records.
Spurred by the nonprofit group “We Can Do Better”, the health providers committed to practicing OpenNotes, are Kaiser Permanente Northwest, Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University, Providence Medical Group Oregon, The Portland Clinic, Vancouver Clinic, Portland VA Medical Center, OCHIN, and Salem Health. The groups are already practicing open notes in some form or intend to do so sometime in 2014 or 2015.
OpenNotes, a national movement was first piloted as part of a large scale research study conducted at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle which are now aggressively adopting this practice. In addition, the VA’s Portland Medical Center since 2013 has adopted full transparency of clinical note access.
The use of OpenNotes by groups in the Northwest extends beyond the region. For example, OCHIN, Inc. an Oregon-based nonprofit health information network operating in 18 states and serving over 2.5 million patients has made it possible for their 78 safety net clinics comprising nearly half in Oregon to use OpenNotes.
The OpenNotes initiative is funded primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and started with a one year study to examine how offering clinician notes to more than 13,000 patients cared for by 105 primary care doctors at three sites would impact patients.
Results have been very positive as patients have reported feeling more in control of their care since they are able to have a greater understanding of their medical conditions and are more likely to take their medications as prescribed. At the end of a year, 99 percent of the patients asked for the practice to continue while none of the doctors chose to withdraw.
Consumer Reports working closely with the movement recently identified OpenNotes as one of the top five innovations in healthcare in 2013. Today, major systems that have implemented the practice now include the Mayo Clinic, and the Cleveland Clinic, in addition to the VA.
For more information on OpenNotes, go to www.myopennotes.org.