Jan 18 2012
The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas physicians are leading this trend. Meanwhile, KHN offers advice to help patients better understand what they might be reading.
Houston Chronicle: Texas Doctors Lead Open-Notes Movement
Texas doctors are at the vanguard of what U.S. researchers say is an inevitable revolution to make consultation notes and other records easily accessible to patients. The idea, at odds with the decades-old attitude that medical records belong to doctors because they're the only ones trained to interpret them, is being tested in an ongoing national study that has already confirmed that patients want to read their notes but most doctors are still resistant. … The change is being pioneered at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which since 2009 has maintained online portals where patients can call up the typed notes their doctor took during their appointments as well as the rest of their records (Ackerman, 1/16).
Kaiser Health News: Insuring Your Health: Peeking In On Your Doctor's Notes
If you saw that your doctor had written "SOB" in the notes he took during your latest office visit, you might be offended and wonder what you'd done to give him such a negative impression. But "SOB," in physicians' shorthand, simply means "shortness of breath" (Andrews, 1/17).
 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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