Tom Delbanco, MD Shares his Passion for Transparency

Tom Delbanco, MD, practices internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital (BIDMC) and is passionate about transparency and the positive impact it can have on the safe delivery of care. Delbanco was a co-investigator from BIDMC on the OpenNotes project which offers patients ready, online access to their clinicians’ visit notes. The program began in 2010, when more than 100 primary care physicians from three organizations—Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), Geisinger Health System, and Harborview Medical Center—invited 20,000 patients to have access to their own clinical notes in their medical records. Today it boasts more than 4.7 million participating patients and is looking to increase that number. Recently, BIDMC received a Commonwealth Fund Grant to develop OurNotes, an extension of OpenNotes.

“ Bottom line is we asked 3 questions: What would patients get out of it and would they read their notes? Would it kill the doctor? What would happen after a year of doing this?
And we had amazing findings… ”

Watch the video to hear Dr. Delbanco answer these questions.

Further resources:

• US experience with doctors and patients sharing clinical notes
• The Road toward Fully Transparent Medical Records