A major hospital system and academic medical center in San Diego is now giving patients access to their doctor notes online.

UC San Diego Health, which operates about 800 beds in three area hospitals and is a part of the University of California Health System, is now participating in OpenNotes. OpenNotes is 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 right to view her or his medical records, including their physician’s notes,” says Marlene Millen, chief medical information officer for ambulatory care at UC San Diego Health. “As a primary care doctor, my hope is that these notes will help my patients have a better understanding of their overall care and will help them see how much I think and care about them.”

Patients can now go online to read provider notes for primary care, internal medicine, family medicine, urology, hematology and oncology. Today, only about 30% of outpatients will have access to their doctor’s notes, with more clinics being added over time, the health system says.

In the future, patients will have the option to post their own comments to doctor notes, although an exact timeline wasn’t announced. “We have already started this process with e-check in across our entire enterprise, which invites patients to check in, complete pre-visit surveys and update their medical information from a mobile device prior to their visit,” says UC San Diego Health chief information officer and associate chief medical officer Christopher Longhurst.

Rather than just a summary of what happened in the visit, now the patient will see their entire clinic notes, Longhurst 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 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.

At the end of May, more than 25 million people are able to access clinical notes through their secure, online patient portals at more than 120 health systems throughout North America, OpenNotes says. So far, California has about 18 healthcare organizations now using OpenNotes and giving patients access to their doctor notes online. In addition to UC San Diego Health, other big California health systems using OpenNotes include Adventist Health, Banner Health, MemorialCare Health Systems, Monterey County Health Services, Providence Health and Services, Stanford Health Care, Sutter Health Medical Foundation (Sacramento) and at the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs among others.

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