Author Interviews, Outcomes & Safety, Primary Care / 28.05.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Janice D. Walker, RN, MBA Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: In 2010-2011, we launched a pilot intervention in which a limited number of primary care doctors shared the notes they wrote about an office visit with their patients via secure online portals they accessed through their health systems; this practice became known as open notes (our program is called “OpenNotes”). We then surveyed patients and their primary care providers to get feedback on their experiences and published the results in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2012. After the study, the three large health systems that participated—Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, University of Washington Medicine in Seattle, and Geisinger in rural Pennsylvania—made open notes available across ambulatory specialties. In this paper, “OpenNotes After 7 Years: Patient Experiences with Ongoing Access to their Clinicians’ Outpatient Visit Notes," we wanted to examine the ongoing experiences and perceptions of patients who read ambulatory notes written by a broad range of doctors, nurses and other clinicians. We did this by surveying patients who had been seen in a hospital or community based practice, were registered on their patient portal, and had at least one note available to read in a recent 12-month period. The main measures include patient-reported behaviors and their perceptions concerning the benefits and risks of reading their visit notes. (more…)
Author Interviews, JAMA, University of Pennsylvania / 14.04.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Genevieve P. Kanter, PhD Assistant Professor (Research) of Medicine Medical Ethics and Health Policy University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine Philadelphia, PA  19104-6021 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?   Response: Physicians frequently have financial relationships with pharmaceutical and medical device firms, but only recently has information on these financial ties been made available to the public. The Open Payments program, created by the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, has made this industry payments information available through a public website since 2014. Because transparent institutions are believed to engender greater public trust, public disclosure of industry payments could increase public trust in the medical profession, which may have been weakened by physicians' relationships with industry. On the other hand, Open Payments may have decreased public trust because of the focus of media reporting on physicians receiving the largest sums of money. We sought to investigate how Open Payments and the public disclosure of industry payments affected public trust in physicians and in the medical profession. We compared changes in trust among patients who lived in states where payments information had, by state statute, previously been made available, to changes in trust among patients who lived in states where this information became newly available through Open Payments. (more…)
Author Interviews, Critical Care - Intensive Care - ICUs, JAMA, Pediatrics, Social Issues / 11.07.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Tessie W. October. MD, MPH Critical Care Specialist Children’s National Health System  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: This is a qualitative study that examines the impact of empathetic statements made by doctors on the ensuing conversation with families of critically ill children. We know families are more satisfied when doctors show empathy, but until this study, we did not know how these empathetic statements are received by families. In this study we found that doctors frequently respond to a family’s emotions by responding with empathy, but how the doctor presented that empathetic statement mattered. When doctors made an empathetic statement, then paused to allow time for a family’s response, the family was 18 times more likely to share additional information about their fears, hopes or values. Conversely, when doctors buried the empathetic statement within medical talk or if a second doctor interrupted, the empathetic statement frequently went unheard by the family. (more…)