Millions of Americans are care partners but they are rarely identified or supported in care delivery. With a portal-based questionnaire, we identified participants with caregiving responsibilities and further evaluated them in order to offer support.
DesRoches, Catherine
Near-wins in the pursuit of quality: does transparency matter if no one is looking?
In this new editorial for BMJ Quality & Safety, Sigall Bell, MD and Cait DesRoches, DrPH reflect on how access to medical notes can improve the quality of care, but only if patients are able to read and understand them. In the time between medical visits, when patients are monitoring their own health, AI may open a new frontier.
Issue Brief: Shared Access to the Patient Portal
This issue brief summarizes the activities and learnings of the Coalition for Care Partners around shared access. Research has spanned from 2019 to 2025, including the formation of the Shared Access Learning Collaborative. The Coalition offers recommendations for policymakers, clinical leadership, patients, and care partners.
Hospitalized patient portal access in the post-information blocking rule era
This single-center, cross-sectional observational study highlights low patient portal utilization among hospitalized patients and disparities in access based on race/ethnicity, gender, age, and insurance status.
Users’ perspectives on a demonstration to increase shared access to older adults’ patient portals
As shared access uptake remains low, the Coalition for Care Partners, and three healthcare delivery organizations, co-designed an initiative promoting shared access to the patient portals of older adults.
A Proof-of-Concept Study for Patient Use of Open Notes with Large Language Models
Can AI chatbots help patients make sense of their medical notes? This first-of-its-kind study published in JAMIA Open finds that with the right prompt, large language models may become powerful partners in understanding complex health information.
Repeated Access to Patient Portal While Awaiting Test Results and Patient-Initiated Messaging
A new study found that patients often refresh the portal while awaiting test results—especially for routine tests. This behavior is linked to increased messaging, suggesting that individual worry may drive communication more than the test itself.
Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal to remove public commentary from US health policy is a threat to science and public health
In a recent BMJ opinion, OpenNotes leaders warn that a proposal by U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to eliminate public comment in federal health policymaking threatens transparency, public trust, and democratic values.
Identifying, Engaging, and Supporting Care Partners in Clinical Settings: Protocol for a Patient Portal–Based Intervention
This study aimed to implement a novel patient portal–based intervention to identify, engage, and support care partners in clinical settings. Early results suggest that the intervention could be an easily scalable and adaptable method of identifying and supporting care partners in clinical settings.
A Multisite Demonstration of Shared Access to Older Adults’ Patient Portals
In this quality improvement study of 16,005 patients from 3 diverse US sites, new shared access registration was unchanged; however, use of shared access functionality among registered care partners increased. Care partners logged in more frequently, viewed more laboratory results and clinical notes, and scheduled more visits after the demonstration.
Except where otherwise noted, the content by OpenNotes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
