In a post this week on the Kevin MD blog, Jon Darer, chief innovation officer for the Division of Clinical Innovation at Geisinger Health System, discussed Geisinger's decision to roll out OpenNotes to most of its physicians and patients.

Geisinger's approach highlights the choices that will be facing many health systems: The results of the OpenNotes study, published last fall, provide compelling evidence to go forward in general, but there is a need to be careful and thoughtful about how to do so. Different specialties and different patient populations have special circumstances that need careful consideration. And each institution has its own culture to be navigated. As more early adopters like Geisinger move forward, we'll learn more about how best to implement this practice and through that learning, make it more widely available. — Steve Downs

“Today, Geisinger Health System, one of the nation’s premier health systems, is taking an important step to expand OpenNotes. We hope other systems follow Geisinger’s lead to share doctors’ notes with patients, giving them information they can use to participate more meaningfully in their care." – Steve Downs

This excerpted post by Geisinger CEO Glenn Steele, MD, first appeared in October 2012, when results from the OpenNotes pilot were released. Geisinger was one of three health systems that participated in the study.

…As a health system CEO who also is a doctor, I believe it is an ethical imperative that our patients at Geisinger know everything that we know about them. And, I think it’s a logical imperative that if we can open up our medical visit notes to our patients, we’ll find out what they understand and what they don’t, so we can answer questions and work as partners to chart a path to better health.

A version of this post originally appeared on Ted’s personal blog.

At 3:30 p.m. on Friday, April 19, I received word that Health Foo, an annual unconference about health set in Cambridge, MA, was canceled because Boston and its surrounding areas were on lockdown as the search for one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects continued. Like me, many other attendees were already en route, and we quickly decided that we’d find a way to make Health Foo happen for anyone who was in town and was interested.

There was no mistaking the gravity of the situation on Friday. The decision to cancel was a good one. What happened next, though, was pretty amazing.

Earlier this year, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) embraced OpenNotes, enabling more than 1 million veterans who currently have access to the VA personal health record to view or download their own medical notes along with their health record information via the My HealtheVet Blue Button. In a recently published study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), the VA's Susan Woods, MD, MPH, a longtime champion of open access and transparency, examined patients’ views and experiences with reading their health records, including clinical notes. The study is the first qualitative look at VA patients’ experiences viewing electronic records that included clinical notes and lab test results. Woods and her colleagues showed that viewing records and notes appeared to empower patients and increase their involvement in their own care but Woods says new communication skills will be needed to optimize the user experience.

In a recent interview, Woods discussed the power of open medical notes for patients and clinicians.   

RWJF has awarded PatientsLikeMe a $1.9 million grant to create the world’s first open-participation research platform to develop patient-centered health outcomes. The new platform will be linked with the PatientsLikeMe network to help researchers develop health outcome measures that better reflect patients’ experiences with a disease, and assess health and quality of life in ways that matter to patients.

Jamie Heywood, co-founder of PatientsLikeMe, and Paul Tarini, senior program officer of the Pioneer Team at RWJF, share their views on why creating an open-access platform to develop measures that matter to patients could advance meaningful treatments that improve health and advance research.

Why is this a pioneering project?  What makes it novel?