By Aditi Pai
OpenNotes co-director Tom Delbanco said that OpenNotes is changing the way doctors craft notes about patients such that physicians will ultimately write notes more for patients than for their own memories or other doctors.
“I think it will be a patient-focused note more and more over time,” Delbanco said at the Pop Health Forum in Boston last week. “We will stop using acronyms — you guys use acronyms all the time. When we say SOB, the patient thinks we are talking about something different. I think you will slowly see the notes morphing and then of course we will adjust them for literacy and for language and we’ll define terms with push of a cursor.”
Delbanco added that eventually patients will stop using the EHR and the patient portal. Instead they’ll carry their notes on their watch, iPhone, or other gadget and maybe even share their notes on social media.
“The doctor-patient relationship and the nurse patient relationship is confidential,” Delbanco said. “If Danny talked to me about one of his patients when I have no particular reason to hear about that patient, Danny will be fired from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center because he’s breaching confidentiality. On the other hand, whether it’s private is now up to the patient. Danny’s patient can download the note, put it on Facebook, and say ‘Hey what do you think of what this guy is saying? Does he know what the hell he is talking about?’ And crowdsource an answer — ‘Should I do this, should I do that?’”