Excerpt from an interview with Jon Hallberg, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, University of Minnesota, on Minnesota Public Radio.
The next time you visit a doctor you may get to see everything they write about you. The record sharing philosophy is call “open notes.”
Q: How is (open notes) different from the, say, MyChart system that a doctor uses?
Hallberg: This is the last holdout of what we’ve been sharing with patients.
You can look at your lab results, and see reminders that you need some kind of testing done… but our clinical notes have been a sacred bastion of our own thoughts about patients.
Technically, everyone owns their own charts… but (the note) has not been something we’ve been sharing until recently
Q: Was there a mindset that too much information might be a bad thing?
Hallberg: This goes back hundreds of years… There was always this idea that (doctors) were trying to keep things separate from patients… that (patients) shouldn’t know about certain things, but of course we’ve gotten way beyond that.
We all know now that we need to be on the same page… No longer do we need to keep things secret.
Q: Is there ever a reason why you would not share more information?
Hallberg: There is no reason why to not share with the patients. There is no reason to not keep something from them.
Listen to the full interview about open notes with Dr. Hallberg on Minnesota Public Radio.
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