Prestigious Healthcare Experts Join OpenNotes Movement

John is an amazing doctor. I had the pleasure of working with John during his tenure at Consumer Reports Health Ratings Center. He made a difference for consumers while at CR and he will definitely continue to make a huge difference in the OpenNotes movement. As the article states “He is a prestigious healthcare expert” but more importantly, he is a darn good man! 

Reprinted from Boston CityBizList / February 24, 2016


National health care leaders, John Santa, MD, MPH, Homer Chin, MD, MS, and Amy Fellows, MPH, have joined the OpenNotes team. The three bring decades of expertise in information technology and population health to the expanding OpenNotes movement.

OpenNotes is a national initiative that urges health care institutions and clinicians to offer patients ready access to notes written by providers after a medical visit. Evidence shows that this type of transparency in health care leads to more active patient engagement, with patients reporting far more control of their own health and healthcare.

In the three years since the results of an initial OpenNotes study were published, the number of patients with ready access to their notes has grown from 20,000 to more than five million. The goal now is to expand open access to notes so that this new practice becomes the national standard of care.

"These three, outstanding individuals bring to OpenNotes considerable healthcare industry and IT expertise, along with vital clinical and consumer perspectives," said Tom Delbanco, MD, co-founder of OpenNotes and Koplow–Tullis Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

John Santa, MD, MPH, Director of Dissemination for OpenNotes, will take a vital leadership role in bringing the OpenNotes movement to clinical sites throughout the country.

Santa has more than 40 years of experience in clinical medicine and administration, having worked in leadership positions for hospitals, physician groups, insurers, state government, and consumer organizations. Drawing on his expertise in national rollouts of healthcare initiatives, he initiated the Northwest OpenNotes Consortium, whose members now offer more than a million patients access to their notes.

Before joining OpenNotes, Santa was Medical Director for the Drug Effectiveness Review Project, one of the country's most robust comparative effectiveness programs, as well as the Director of the Health Ratings Center at Consumer Reports from 2008 to 2014. The Ratings Center focuses on explicit approaches for evaluating and comparing health services, products, institutions, and practitioners. He is a board member and Treasurer of the National Physicians Alliance and a resident of Oregon.

"Transparency was my top priority in clinical practice and at Consumer Reports. I am thrilled to be part of a movement that brings that to millions of individual patients," said Santa. "If you're healthy, clinician notes are interesting, educating, and help you set priorities. But, if you're sick and want to be a full-fledged member of your own health care team, easy access to clinician notes is a game changer."

Homer Chin, MD, MS, will lead efforts to integrate Health Information Technology further with OpenNotes. He has extensive knowledge of medical informatics and electronic health systems and will work closely with electronic health record vendors, helping them to develop sophisticated methods for supporting OpenNotes.

Chin is an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Medical Informatics and Outcomes Research at the Oregon Health and Science University and a member of the board of OCHIN, a not-for-profit organization that provides information and management services to safety-net clinics in support of the medically underserved.

Chin was previously the Associate Medical Director for Medical Informatics at Kaiser Permanente Northwest, where he pioneered efforts to implement an award-winning comprehensive computer-based outpatient record.

"With the advent of the electronic health record it becomes much easier to share notes among providers, and as a logical extension, with patients. In light of the many benefits of doing so, it is time that we engage and empower patients by providing them easy access to their own medical information," said Chin. "We also have opportunities to work with EHR developers to enhance the patient experience and make it easier for them to interact with notes."

Amy Fellows, MPH, joins OpenNotes to focus on Community Health Programs, with particular attention to individuals who are medically underserved. She brings considerable experience in working to introduce electronic health records to the increasing number of vulnerable populations served by the OpenNotes movement.

Fellows is the Executive Director of We Can Do Better, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating opportunities for education and engagement, bringing people together who share the values of better health care and health for all. Under Fellow's leadership, We Can Do Better convened the Northwest OpenNotes Consortium, which currently includes all nine major health systems in the Portland, Oregon metro area. The group continues to expand, adding practices of all sizes, but has already allowed more than one million patients access to their medical notes through patient portals.

"OpenNotes is proving invaluable for helping patients take charge of their health," said Fellows. "I'm proud to be part of this movement whose goal is to help all patients and families take a more active role in their personal health care."

About OpenNotes

OpenNotes is a national movement that invites patients, families and clinicians to come together and improve communication through shared clinicians' notes and fully transparent medical records. Based at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, OpenNotes is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Cambia Health Foundation and the Peterson Center on Healthcare. To learn more, visit www.opennotes.org.

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RWJ: $120k challenge to help understand hospital pricing data

FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES $120,000 CHALLENGE TO HELP CONSUMERS UNDERSTAND AND ACT UPON HOSPITAL PRICING


Applicants will create data visualizations and applications to help people compare what different hospitals charge

Princeton, N.J. – The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has launched a competition among technology developers to improve consumer understanding and use of data that compare hospital prices. Winners of the RWJF Hospital Price Transparency Challenge will share $120,000 in prize money. The competition was announced yesterday at Health Datapalooza IV in Washington, DC.

Last month the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) took the unprecedented step of publishing prices charged by more than 3,000 hospitals for the 100 most common inpatient procedures. The information showed extreme variation in pricing among U.S. hospitals—even those operating in the same communities. Experts say it underscores the urgent need for transparency in the health care system.

The RWJF Hospital Price Transparency Challenge is designed to further disseminate the use of the CMS hospital data. The competition consists of two components—one for creating visualizations of the data and another for developing consumer applications and tools. The visualization challenge requires entrants to create visual representations to help consumers and others better understand, explore and interpret the information. Applicants are encouraged to incorporate other data which can be used in combination with the hospital pricing data. The apps and tools developed should help improve understanding of the hospital pricing information and promote further transparency about prices.

“The challenge asks technology developers to transform these data into intuitive, actionable tools,” said Katherine Hempstead, Ph.D., senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “We hope this will spark discussion and innovation that will help further progress toward increased price transparency in health care.”

Winners of the visualization component of the challenge will be announced at the Health 2.0 Fall Conference in October 2013. The deadline for submissions is August 25. The app and tools component will take place in two phases. The first phase will select five semi-finalists, who will be announced at the Health 2.0 Fall Conference. The deadline for this first phase is August 4. The second phase will select winning entries from among the semi-finalists. Winners will be announced on December 9 at the mHealth Summit. Staff from Health 2.0 and Visualizing.org will manage both challenges.

This is the third competition RWJF has sponsored with Health 2.0 to seek innovative uses of health care data. RWJF launched the ‘Aligning Forces Challenge’ in 2011, seeking applications to make health care quality data more accessible, and announced the winners at the 2012 Health Datapalooza. In 2012, RWJF launched the ‘Games to Generate Data Challenge,’ currently ongoing, which asks developers to use games and gaming concepts to create health care quality data.

Information on the challenge is available at: http://www.health2con.com/devchallenge/rwjf-hospital-price-transparency-challenge/.