Want to Know What Your Doctor Thinks About Your Case? Open Notes Will Tell You

 Think what it would be like to be able to read your doctor's notes about you. You'd prbably love it until you got to the part where he writes you're fat.

Willamette Health Partners in Oregon will soon experiment with allowing patients to get access to their doctors’ medical notes online, according to statesmanjournal.com.

Called OpenNotes, Salem Health’s outpatient clinics are joining a number of other health care organizations in the Northwest that are already practicing Open Notes or intend to in the next year or two. They include Kaiser Permanente, Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University, Providence Medical Group Oregon, The Portland Clinic, The Vancouver Clinic and Portland VA Medical Center.

Shea Corum of Salem Health tells Saerom Yoo the pilot program will help assess whether patients find the additional information helpful and whether it stimulates more productive conversations. It will also demonstrate how patients' access to these notes will affect the work flow of providers.

If it’s officially rolled out, 12,000 patients could have access to it.

The program was actually started on the East Coast as part of a large-scale research study conducted at health systems in Boston, Pennsylvania and Seattle, according to a press release from nonprofit We Can Do Better.

The Boston Globe reports that, as part of an ongoing effort to make care more transparent, clinicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have begun posting mental health notes in patients’ electronic medical records, allowing the patients immediate access to the summaries at home.

On March 1, about 40 providers started sharing their notes with more than 650 patients. Providers were nervous, in the beginning. “We all had some reservations,’’ Dr. Michael Kahn, a psychiatrist who has worked at Beth Israel Deaconess for 20 years, tells The Globe. “What about if a patient misinterpreted a note? Would they be upset about it? Would it confuse them?’’

"But ultimately, he and his colleagues decided that sharing the notes could improve care by encouraging patients to more actively participate in their treatment, while inspiring providers to describe patients nonjudgmentally," The Globe notes.

Will it catch on?  It's hard to tell.  Some patients will love it, and others will hate it.  I, myself, would love to have access to my medical records.  When I was being treated for breast cancer several years ago, I would have liked to know that my doctors weren't sure whether to take more drastic action when the illness recurred.  (In the end, they did.)

I'd also now like to read whether they feel I was over-treated (I believe I was).  So would this really have helped me?  I guess trust has to enter into it somewhere but it would be nice to know exactly what a doctor thinks as he goes over your case.