By PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.
The New York Times
Originally published on October 4, 2012
Here are some excerpts:
This patient’s experience, like those of so many others who have tried to obtain their medical records, came to mind this week when I read about the long-awaited results of a study in which patients were given complete access to their doctors’ notes. The findings, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, do more than shed light on what patients want. They make our current ideas about transparency in the patient-doctor relationship a quaint artifact of the past.
Since 1996, when Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, patients have had the right to read and even amend their own records.
In fact, few patients have ever consulted their own records. Most do not fully grasp the extent of their legal rights; and the few who have attempted to exercise them have often found themselves mired in a parallel universe filled with administrative regulations, small-print permission forms, added costs and repeated delays.
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For one year, the study, aptly called OpenNotes, allowed over 13,000 patients from three medical centers — the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa., and the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle — to have complete access to one part of their medical records, the notes that doctors wrote about them. Within days of seeing their doctors, patients received an e-mail inviting them to read the doctor’s signed note on a secure patient Web site. Two weeks before their return visit, patients received a second e-mail inviting them again to review their doctor’s note from the previous encounter.
After a year, almost all the patients were enthusiastic about the OpenNotes initiative.
Surprisingly, so were the majority of doctors.
The entire article is here.
The research from the Annals of Internal Medicine is here.
