Patients Strongly Support Access to Clinical Notes

When Harvard Medical School researchers came up with the idea to open up clinical notes to patients as an experiment, their first step was finding out how people felt about the idea -- and what they expected to happen as a result. What they found were near-unanimous support from patients and opinions from physicians that ran the gamut -- enthusiasm to fear for patients' safety.

The OpenNotes project launched in 2009 as an experiment at primary care practices at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Geisinger Health System in rural Pennsylvania and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. At the start of the experiment, 37,856 patients, 110 participating physicians and 63 nonparticipating doctors were asked about their expectations, fears and thoughts on what would happen if physicians' clinical notes were open and made available for patients to read. Results of the survey were published in a paper that appeared in the Dec. 20, 2011, issue of Annals of Internal Medicine...