Foundations offer $10M in funding to expand OpenNotes

Four foundations have come together to provide OpenNotes with $10 million in new funding to spread access to clinical notes to 50 million patients.

Cambia Health Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Peterson Center on Healthcare, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced the funding.

OpenNotes, a national initiative that urges doctors and other clinicians to offer patients ready access to their visit notes, has been shown in studies to imrpove patient engagement. The OpenNotes movement, begun in 2010, has expanded beyond primary care to more than 5 million Americans.

By dramatically expanding the scope of the OpenNotes project, the four national philanthropies funding the program are asserting that this innovation in the delivery of care, if spread nationwide, can improve the U.S. healthcare system’s performance.

“Our research shows increasingly that patients can benefit greatly from reading the notes taken during a medical visit. They tell us they feel more in control of their care and are more likely to follow up on recommendations,” said Jan Walker, RN, MBA, co-founder of OpenNotes and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). “This has enormous implications for improving the quality and costs of care. Moreover, we’re learning that having a second set of eyes on the record may be an important way to improve patient safety.”

For the next three years, the new funding will support OpenNotes’ ability to assist providers with adoption, to reach a wide range of consumers, and to evaluate the impact of the effort on health outcomes and costs. OpenNotes will work with a broadly representative advisory board to target healthcare organizations and consumer advocacy groups, and also individual clinicians and consumers.

“OpenNotes will make clinicians’ thinking far more transparent, and that holds both complex and exciting implications for patients, for their family members, and for the host of health providers who care for them. This is particularly true for vulnerable populations, and patients with a large burden of chronic illness, including mental illness,” said Tom Delbanco, MD, co-founder of OpenNotes, a primary care doctor at BIDMC, and the Koplow–Tullis Professor of General Medicine and Primary Care at HMS. “Opening the doctor’s black box breaks down traditional barriers and provides a foundation for all kinds of exciting innovations in healthcare, changes that in my view will benefit the vast majority of patients and their clinicians.”