OpenNotes Introduces Advisory Board

Health care and consumer advocacy expertise to guide national movement toward transparency in medicine

Newswise — BOSTON, September 12, 2016 – OpenNotes is pleased to announce that ten extraordinary advocates for health care quality and improvement are the founding members of the OpenNotes Advisory Board.

“This is an outstanding group of innovators,” said Cait DesRoches, DrPH, OpenNotes Executive Director. “They have decades of experience in patient care, health information technology, and advocating for the most vulnerable. We’re excited to work with them as we move forward in our efforts to make OpenNotes the standard of care for all patients.”

OpenNotes is a national movement that urges doctors, nurses and other health care providers to share the notes they write with the patients they care for. Advisory Board members will help guide OpenNotes’ efforts to use the fully transparent medial record as a vehicle to improve doctor and patient communication, increase patient engagement and safety, as well as provide opportunities for efficiencies in health care delivery and the potential to improve health outcomes for patients.

“What these individuals have already achieved is very impressive, and we have no doubt they’ll be invaluable guides for us as OpenNotes expands,” said Tom Delbanco, MD, the co-founder of OpenNotes and the Koplow–Tullis Professor of General Medicine and Primary Care at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “Their thoughts and ideas will be enormously important in helping us achieve our goal of spreading OpenNotes access to 50 million patients over the next three years.”

The founding members of the OpenNotes Advisory Board:

• Lisa Cooper, MD, MPH, is the Fries Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School where she leads the Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. She has been honored with a MacArthur “genius” award and election to the National Academy of Medicine (the former IOM).

• Dave deBronkart, also known as “e-Patient Dave,” is a stage IV kidney cancer survivor and one of the world's leading advocates for patient engagement, with a particular focus on access to personal health data. He serves on the British Medical Journal’s patient advisory panel, and his compelling TEDx Talk “Let Patients Help” was for years in the top half of most-watched TED talks of all time.

• James Guest, JD, is the former President and CEO of Consumer Reports. He currently volunteers as President of Consumers International, a federation of more than 250 organizations from over 115 countries that is the global voice and advocate for the world's consumers.
• John Halamka, MD, MS, is nationally recognized for his numerous contributions to health information technology. An emergency physician by training, John is the International Healthcare Innovation Professor at Harvard Medical School and Chief Information Officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess System, where he introduced one of the first patient portals nationally.

• Susan R. Mende, BSN, MPH, is a Senior Program Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) where her specialty area is health care delivery system reform, including higher value care for complex high cost populations, overuse, transparency in health care quality, and community and consumer engagement.

• Jeffrey Rayport, PhD, is an award-winning educator at Harvard Business School who currently teaches entrepreneurial techniques that include strategic applications of digital, social, and mobile media; strategies to deepen consumer engagement; and competing in a service economy.

• Elaine Ryan, MPA, is Vice President for Governmental Affairs at AARP (formerly the American Association of Retired Persons), where she helped build a more robust engagement strategy for the organization's policy work with the National Governors Association, other intergovernmental groups, and within the field.

• Jill Shah is an entrepreneur, social activist, explorer in internet-related innovations, and founder and former CEO of Jill’s List, an online resource enabling a network of patients, practitioners, and organizations to connect and learn from one another.

• Kate Walsh, MPH, is the President and CEO of Boston Medical Center. She has had decades of health care management experience at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and Massachusetts General Hospital and brings invaluable perspective as the leader of a major medical center that pays special attention to the needs of the underserved.

• Mark Wietecha, MS, MBA, is the President and CEO of the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) based in Washington, DC, where he represents over 200 children’s hospitals and major pediatric programs. With a mission to improve child health through innovation in care, education, and research, CHA advances these aims by fostering collaboration to improve national policy, payment systems, and pediatric practice to better serve the unique health care needs of children.

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. The movement is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Peterson Center on Healthcare and Cambia Health Foundation. Learn more at www.opennotes.org.