Patients to get a look at physicians’ notes

From the Boston Globe:

Amid the national push to computerize medical records and make them more open to patients, one of the most intense areas of debate is whether patients should be allowed to see their doctors’ notes online.

Doctors write these one- to two-page comments after every visit, and other physicians who treat the patient read them, too. But the notes usually aren’t readily available to patients because hospitals and doctors’ groups fear that they will misunderstand medical jargon, take offense at a blunt observation, or worry unnecessarily about a precautionary test.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, however, is about to begin a project called “open notes’’ in which about 100 doc tors at the hospital and two other sites will allow 25,000 to 35,000 patients to read their physicians’ notes for a year as part of their online medical record.

Researchers hope to learn whether the notes prove more useful than objectionable. They hypothesize that access to doctors’ notes will improve care partly because patients will become more knowledgeable about their treatment and about their doctors’ instructions.