OpenNotes, once an academic experiment to see if physicians would accept patients viewing encounter notes and if patients could decipher the medicalese, is getting ready to scale.
Tuesday, four charitable foundations announced that they together would contribute $10 million so 50 million Americans can gain electronic access to their visit notes over the next three years. That is nearly 10 times more than the 5 million who currently participate in OpenNotes.
The money comes courtesy of the Cambia Health Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Peterson Center on Healthcare, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. None of the foundations commented directly on the new gift, though RWJF was an initial funding source for OpenNotes in 2010, and Portland, Oregon-based Cambia has supported the program in the Pacific Northwest.
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OpenNotes started as an experiment involving 100 primary care physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and Geisinger Health System across Central Pennsylvania. After one year, 99 percent of the participating patients surveyed said they wanted access to continue, while 85 percent said the ability to view physician notes would affect their choice of healthcare provider in the future.
It has since grown into a “movement,” according to co-founder Jan Walker, a nurse informaticist at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School. “This has enormous implications for improving the quality and costs of care. Moreover, we’re learning that having a second set of eyes on the record may be an important way to improve patient safety,” Walker said Tuesday in announcing the donations.
Now, OpenNotes has bigger ambitions. “Our expanding team now has a remarkable opportunity to move OpenNotes from a longstanding promising idea toward a new national standard of medical care,” said the other co-founder, Dr. Tom Delbanco, a BIDMC primary care physician.
