We Can Do Better: Northwest patients to gain easy access to clinicians’ notes

April 8, 2014

Regional collaboration spurs first widespread adoption of the OpenNotes initiative

Portland, Ore. – A unique regional collaboration among nine prominent health systems and medical groups in the Northwest will provide more than one million patients in Oregon and Southwest Washington with electronic access to the notes their providers include in medical records. This marks the first time that OpenNotes, a national movement that urges health-related organizations to adopt open access to clinician notes as a standard of care, has been embraced simultaneously throughout an entire region.

Spurred by the efforts of the nonprofit group, We Can Do Better, the health providers that have committed to practicing open notes, are Kaiser Permanente Northwest, Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University, Providence Medical Group Oregon, The Portland Clinic, The Vancouver Clinic, Portland VA Medical Center, OCHIN and Salem Health. Each of these groups is already practicing open notes in some form or intends to do so sometime in 2014 or 2015.

 

Check out the full press release on We Can Do Better’s website.