CoxHealth, a five-hospital, 860 bed health system headquartered in Springfield, Mo., is giving patients electronic access to physician notes.
Cox, which serves patients in Southwest Missouri and Northwest Arkansas, is adding OpenNotes, a web tool that lets patients read doctor notes after an office visit or procedure, as part of its digital healthcare portal.
“Patients have a legal right to their clinic notes, and they can walk into our clinics at any time and request those, and we are just making it easier for them to get this information,” says CoxHealth chief medical information officer Dr. Louis Krenn. “This new level of transparency will strengthen the collaboration between our care providers and the patients, their families and caregivers.”
Sharing notes through an electronic portal provides many benefits, including improved adherence to treatment plans, safer care, better patient relationships and even greater provider satisfaction, Krenn says.
Rather than just a summary of what happened in the visit, now the patient will see their entire clinic notes, Krenn says. The information may include documentation from the physical exam, any information that the provider collected at the time of the visit, the plan of care, any medications prescribed and any orders that were placed.
The only time notes might not appear in the portal is if they contain sensitive information that would be best shared with patients in another way, Krenn says.
CoxHealth has over 160,000 emergency, urgent care, and trauma visits each year.
The push for more patient access to physician notes is being led by OpenNotes, an organization launched and maintained by Harvard Medical Teaching Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. OpenNotes helps healthcare organizations establish programs that give patients access to doctor and other provider notes through a digital healthcare portal.
Among the healthcare organizations rolling out OpenNotes are Beth Israel, Geisinger Health System in rural Pennsylvania, Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, the Veteran’s Administration in Washington, D.C., and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.
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