In January I wrote a post about a study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that was looking at physician and patient reaction to a program that enables patients to access their doctor’s notes recorded during an office visit and stored in the electronic health record. The objective of the study was to evaluate the effect on doctors and patients of providing patients with access these notes using secure patient portals.
The study included 105 primary care physicians, and 13,564 of their patients at three locations: the Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, MA, Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania and Harborview Medical Center in Seattle Washington.
The results, reported this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, indicate that of a total of 13,564 participants, 11,797 opened at least one note; 77-87% of them reported that open notes made them feel more in control of their care; and 60-78% reported increased medication compliance with the availability of the notes. A small percentage, 1-8% reported that the availability of notes caused them to feel confused and worried. Additionally, almost 90% believed that having these notes affected their decisions when seeking care in the future.
In other words, on an overall basis, this study proved that a majority of patients like access to their primary care physician’s notes and will use them to increase their understanding of their health issues. Engaging these patients in this way will impact their quality of care. Furthermore, physicians who had been concerned that access to notes would cause patients to become worried realized that this only happened in rare instances. They also learned from the study that patient access to notes ended up having far less impact on the physician’s time than they had anticipated.
For Open Notes to work there has to be a secure way to transmit information to the patient. In the case of the three institutions involved in the research, they all had a secure patient portal through which the notes could be accessed by patients. However, patient portals are not ubiquitous and will not be for some time, as they are costly to implement and maintain, particularly for small group practices and community hospitals that comprise the bulk of our medical delivery system in this country.
Although it is possible for doctors to produce patient notes on various media from old-fashioned paper to CDs and flash drives, this puts an added burden on the physician’s office. However, doctors may not have a choice about providing notes in the near term as one of the mandates of Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records, Stage 2 clearly states that by 2014, all physicians must provide patients with: (1) a copy of their electronic health record; (2) clinical summaries of their office visit (3) appointment recalls; and (4) timely access to health information.
The completion of this study reinforces that Open Notes promotes the type of patient/physician relationship that furthers patient engagement and empowerment and ultimately will help improve the health of patients, increase medication adherence and hopefully bring more efficiency into the health care system by reducing unnecessary office and ER visits.
