Sharing Notes for Better Doctor-Patient Communication
Excellent communication between physicians and patients is a crucial element of hospital quality, but it’s also an ongoing challenge for many institutions. One physician wondered whether letting patients read their physicians’ notes could help.
“I wanted to find new methods to improve patient understanding of their medical care plan,” says Craig Weinert, MD, MPH, medical director for adult inpatient services at the University of Minnesota Medical Center and author of “Giving Doctors’ Daily Progress Notes to Hospitalized Patients and Families to Improve Patient Experience” in the American Journal of Medical Quality. “It seemed logical to me that giving patients access to the same information that all the other members of the healthcare team were reading would improve communication. This is the overall hypothesis of the Open Notes movement.”
Another reason Dr. Weinert pursued the study: In his clinical job as an intensivist, he encounters frequent disagreements with patients’ families regarding prognosis and goals of care.
“No one has figured out how to increase the alignment of prognosis between the family and the medical team,” Dr. Weinert says. “I think having the families read the doctors’ notes, where the issues with poor-prognosis multi-organ failure are repeatedly spelled out, might help families more quickly grasp the futility of continuing care.”
During the study, hospitalized patients or family members on six wards of a university hospital received a printed copy of their medical team’s daily progress notes. Surveys afterward showed 74% to 86% of patients and family members responded favorably. Physicians were mostly satisfied, too.
“Most doctors, at the end of the study, thought that Open Notes went better than they had predicted,” Dr. Weinert says.
Complete transparency of medical records is the future of medicine, he says. It’s what patients want, “especially the younger generation.”
“Over the next 10 years,” he says, “I predict … all [electronic medical record] vendors will have electronic portals that allow clinic and hospitalized patients access to almost everything in the EMR.”
Reference
1. Weinert C. Giving doctors’ daily progress notes to hospitalized patients and families to improve patient experience. Am J Med Qual. 2015. doi:10.1177/1062860615610424.
