OpenNotes is getting ready to scale its doctor notes service with the new flux of capital worth $10 million. The funds were provided by four charitable foundations — including the Cambia Health Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Peterson Center on Healthcare, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — so that 50 million Americans can gain electronic access to their visit notes over the next three years. Right now, OpenNotes is used by 5 million patients so these organizations are bullish “this thing” will fly.

OpenNotes started as an experiment with 100 primary care physicians at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and Geisinger Health System across Central Pennsylvania. After a year, 99 percent of the participating patients surveyed said they wanted access to continue, while 85 percent said the ability to view physician notes would affect their choice of healthcare provider in the future.

Ever since, OpenNotes has grown into a “movement,” according to co-founder Jan Walker, a nurse informaticist at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School. “This has enormous implications for improving the quality and costs of care,” he said. “Moreover, we’re learning that having a second set of eyes on the record may be an important way to improve patient safety.”

OpenNotes now has bigger ambitions. “Our expanding team now has a remarkable opportunity to move OpenNotes from a longstanding promising idea toward a new national standard of medical care,” said the other co-founder, Dr. Tom Delbanco, a BIDMC primary care physician.

[Via: MedCityNews]