Providers Encourage Shared Accountability With Patients
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
More providers are asking patients to read medical records and spot errors.
More healthcare providers are encouraging patients to correct errors in their medical records and allowing them to view and edit notes about them online according to the Wall Street Journal. Much of this is driven by studies showing errors can occur on as many as 95 percent of the medication lists found in patient medical records.
These errors include outdated data and omissions that many patients could readily identify, such as incorrect lists of prescription drugs or frequency or dosage errors. Healthcare providers are also asking patients to provide information about over-the-counter pain relievers and medications, including supplements and vitamins, in order to help avoid drug interactions with prescriptions.
In a bold move, several large medical providers, including Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, the Veterans Health Administration, Geisinger Health System, and Kaiser Permanente, have begun to give patients direct online access to their doctors' notes, experimenting with various methods of soliciting feedback and allowing patients to correct or add to their records.
"If we don't have accurate data we can't take care of patients appropriately," says Jonathan Darer, CIO at Geisinger. According to Darer, the aim is to move patients and doctors into a relationship of "shared accountability" and more effective medical care.
Geisinger ran a pilot study in which patients with chronic diseases like diabetes and heart failure were invited to go online between November 2011 and June 2012 to update the medications in their electronic health records before a doctor's visit. They could update medications list online and then Geisinger pharmacists followed up with the patients to update their records and notify doctors and case managers about changes.
Nearly 90 percent of the patients requested changes to their medication records, including changes to doses and frequency of existing medications and requests to have new medications entered. On average, patients had 10.7 medications listed, with 2.4 requested changes. Focus group participants said access to the medication list better prepared them for doctor visits and enabled them to take a proactive role in managing their care.
According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geisinger is currently adopting the medication feedback initiative more broadly in the health system, which serves northeastern and central Pennsylvania. It also is expanding its use of another initiative, Open Notes, which currently allows some 168,000 patients to view their doctors' notes online through a secure patient portal.
Patients can add their own notes, and starting this summer family caregivers will be able to add notes, including asking for corrections about patients who may not be able to comment on their own.