Open Notes and the Electronic Medical Record: IHI Audio Program

Open Notes and the Electronic Medical Record: IHI Audio Program

If you had the chance to look at what your physician wrote in your medical record about your last visit, would you take advantage of it? Would this make your relationship with your doctor or primary care provider more collaborative? More effective? These are just some of the important questions and issues bearing down on our health care system as an online universe and electronic medical records make shared viewing of what are often referred to as the “doctor’s notes” feasible. What’s contained in the notes and does transparency interfere in any way with their value?

For obvious reasons (I hope), I am a big fan of this project. I signed up to listen in, but I may not be able to make it do to a conflict. If someone else signs up, could they maybe post a summary?

3 Comments

Should be interesting; can help out. Now doing focus groups with patients who had access to their entire record online. No big surprise they like it a lot. More of a surprise they Google words they don't understand.

Hi Sue,

That would be great, and any insights on the focus groups you are doing would also be useful. Maybe if you could just start with describing what's happening with patients accessing their whole record online. Is this still happening? For how many people?

Perhaps you would be interested in writing a guest blog post here? You would be the very first….

PS Myself and others have known about the desire to google medical terms for a long time, this is why it's really important to use the actual medical terms in diagnoses, test results, etc – glad your experience is similar, I guess patients have a lot in common wherever they get care (and they all want their data),

Ted

Ted Eytan, MD