The Commonwealth Fund Supports Tool to Encourage Patient Contribution to Clinical Notes
Funded by The Commonwealth Fund, OurNotes is an extension of the nationwide OpenNotes, a movement to offer patients ready, online access to their clinicians’ visit notes. Currently, more than 20 million patients across the country have electronic access and can read their clinicians’ notes. The OurNotes initiative aims to encourage patients and providers to jointly create clinical notes and care plans within a shared electronic health record.
Encouraging patients to help write and add notes to their personal medical charts — a task typically handled only by medical professionals — may help patients feel more involved with their own care and improve relationships with their doctors, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
In that research, doctors at UCLA Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center found that patients could benefit if they are invited to co-produce medical notes, through OurNotes, with their doctors, rather than merely reading them. The practice may also benefit doctors by reducing time spent on documentation, according to a UCLA press release on the study...