EHR, Patient Portals and OpenNotes: Making OpenNotes Work Well – #HITsm Chat Topic

We’re excited to share the topic and questions for this week’s #HITsm chat happening Friday, 12/8 at Noon ET (9 AM PT). This week’s chat will be hosted by Homer Chin (@chinhom) and Amy Fellows (@afellowsamy) from (@MyOpenNotes) on the topic of “EHR, Patient Portals and OpenNotes: Making OpenNotes Work Well.”

There are now nearly 100 health systems across the United States using secure patient portals to share visit notes with more than 20 million of their patients. And as the saying goes, if you’ve seen one OpenNotes implementation, you’ve seen one OpenNotes implementation.

No two health systems approach OpenNotes in the same way, and much of the variation stems from human resistance to change. Change is hard; whether it involves assuring and supporting clinicians in their move toward sharing notes or whether it’s surmounting technical challenges within the electronic health record.

We know the electronic health record is here to stay. We’re not going back to paper. And we know that when patients are offered online access to the medical information in their records, including access to notes, these patients continue to want that access and they share its benefits.

At their annual meeting in November 2017, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) announced a formal collaboration with OpenNotes, stating, “The evidence-base is clear: providing patients access to their physician’s notes improves physician-patient communication and trust, patient safety, and perhaps even patient outcomes.”

So how do we bridge resistance to change? And as OpenNotes expands, how do we guide health systems to ensure the best possible patient experience?

Join us as we dive into this topic during this week’s #HITsm chat using the following questions. Homer Chin and Amy Fellows will be on hand to share key learnings from vendors and health IT teams that have been making OpenNotes work over the past few years.

Reference Materials:

Topics for This Week’s #HITsm Chat:

T1: What cultural barriers to OpenNotes adoption and use exist within the #healthcare IT profession vs. the clinical/medical community? #hitsm

T2: Given that OpenNotes is a movement and not a discrete software product, what are the technical challenges for implementing OpenNotes inside the patient portal? #hitsm

T3: If you’re currently implementing OpenNotes in your health system: What advice and/or cavetats can you share with colleagues? #hitsm

T4: If you haven’t implemented OpenNotes at your health system: What’s holding you back? What do you believe are the key challenges impeding implementation? #hitsm

T5: What customization strategies and/or tips do you have for helping patients navigate healthcare portals to find their #medical record notes? #hitsm

BONUS: What type of “OpenNotes-related” functionality should #EHR vendors be including in their product(s) to serve both clinicians AND patients? #hitsm

Upcoming #HITsm Chat Schedule
12/15 – What’s Keeing HealthIT from Soaring to the Cloud?
Hosted by David Fuller (@genkidave)

12/22 – Holiday Break

12/29 – Holiday Break

We look forward to learning from the #HITsm community! As always, let us know if you’d like to host a future #HITsm chat or if you know someone you think we should invite to host.

If you’re searching for the latest #HITsm chat, you can always find the latest #HITsm chat and schedule of chats here.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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