A $50,000 grant will help OpenNotes develop tools to let providers collaborate on patient portal notes with patients who do not speak English.
A new grant award is set to help OpenNotes, an organization advocating patient access to clinical notes, develop a tool to make it easier for patients and families with limited English proficiency (LEP) to collaborate on patient portal notes.
Specifically, the award is going to help OpenNotes create tools that will foster collaboration when documenting diagnosis. Diagnostic errors are among some of the most common and costly medical errors, according to 2013 figures in BMJ Quality & Safety. Some 12 million adults accessing care in outpatient settings see at least one diagnostic error in their medical records every year, OpenNotes reported, and that can result in up to 80,000 premature deaths.
The $50,000 grant should help OpenNotes create tools to make it easier for LEP patients and their families to correct diagnostic errors within clinical notes.
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
Patient access to clinical notes, as OpenNotes promotes, is a key patient safety strategy providers use to detect diagnostic errors. In June, OpenNotes reported that one in five patients have found some sort of medical error by way of having access to their own clinical notes. Of those patients, about a quarter found an EHR error having to do with diagnostics.
Of the very serious errors the researchers said patients reported, 58.9 percent were diagnostic errors, or something to do with documenting the medical history, conducting the physical examination, noting tests, making referrals, or documenting other patient-provider communication.
These findings underscored the importance of collaborative clinical notes. Collaborative clinical notes would allow the patient to flag when they saw what they believed to be a medical error, like a diagnostic error, in their clinician notes. Clinicians can review the patient flag and make adjustments where applicable.
But there are some limits to that collaborative approach. For patients for whom English is not their primary language, a collaborative clinical note process is not going to be very accessible.
The grant, awarded by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) as part of its DxQi Seed Grant program, will help OpenNotes determine a better approach for LEP patients and families.
“Patient and family experiences of diagnostic breakdowns are inadequately heard, understood, and measured, and this may be an especially important gap in the care of patients who speak languages other than English,” according to Sigall K. Bell, MD, director of Patient Safety & Discovery at OpenNotes, and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
OpenNotes experts will work with the Boston Children’s Hospital Spanish Collaborative to first determine the challenges to collaborative clinical note sharing. Researchers will interview LEP patients and families to create a list of the roadblocks and issues they encounter with diagnostic accuracy.
“We are eager to continue our longstanding collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital and work towards improving diagnosis among LEP populations,” Bell said. “Diagnostic error is a significant problem, especially among the most vulnerable patients and families, and we are proud to be part of a cohort at SIDM developing specific strategies to improve the accuracy and timeliness of diagnosis.”
After researchers have outlined diagnostic error issues with LEP patients and families, they plan to build a tool that will help LEP patients and families collaborate on clinical notes with their medical providers. Currently, language barriers may prevent that collaboration.
SIDM intends for OpenNotes and the 16 other grantees it awarded to build an evidence base that they will share with the rest of the medical community. For example, SIDM will annually report on the progress each of the 17 grantees have made in their interventions, the organization said. SIDM will also clarify which projects need further work.
“There are very few proven real-world solutions to minimize the harm diagnostic errors can cause,” said Gerard M. Castro, PhD, MPH, PMP, director of Quality Improvement for SIDM. “The DxQI grants awarded through the program are a first step in learning what best practices we can build into the diagnostic process to ensure that patients receive a diagnosis that is accurate, determined in a timely manner, and effectively communicated.”
Source: Patient Engagementhit