Beth Israel Pilot To Let Patients Add Notes To Medical Records

Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center received a $450,000 grant from The Commonwealth Fund this week to develop a program called OurNotes that allows patients to contribute to their medical records. The program is an extension of the well-known OpenNotes initiative and will include collaboration with a handful of other providers across the country.

“This is really building for the future,” BIDMC Principal Investigator Jan Walker said in a statement. “We envision the potential capability of OurNotes to range from allowing patients to, for example, add a list of topics or questions they’d like to cover during an upcoming visit, creating efficiency in that visit, to inviting patient to review and sign off on notes after a visit as way to ensure that patients and clinicians are on the same page.”

The original OpenNotes is an initiative that aims to provide patients with access to their clinician’s notes. The movement to make clinicians’ notes available to patients began to generate headlines in 2012 when researchers at BIDMC found that patients with access to clinician notes were more engaged and saw better outcomes. The results from the year-long study of more than 13,500 primary care patients and 100 physicians were published in Annals of Internal Medicine...