September 9, 2014 – Open Notes

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Anchor lead: Do you want to read what your doctor writes about you?  Elizabeth Tracey reports

Open Notes is a project that’s been underway for several years allowing patients to read their own medical charts, including their physician’s notes.  Howard Levy, an internal medicine physician and leader of a group evaluating such a strategy at Johns Hopkins, says studies have shown that people can help correct errors in their charts but don’t barrage the doctor.

Levy: One of the nice reassuring things in the Open Notes project is that they tracked messaging of patients to their providers.  One would theorize that if there were a lot of error correction going on there would be an increase in the messages from patients.  That didn’t materialize.  At the same time however patients were feeling more empowered and more energized, and when they did find mistakes in the chart they were notifying their provider, and the truth is most of us in medicine are trying to do good by our patients and if we’ve made a mistake we’d much rather fix it.   :30

Levy says the hope for Open Notes is to further engage people in their own medical decision making and care.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.