[music] ASCO: You’re listening to a podcast from Cancer.Net. This cancer information website is produced by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, known as ASCO, the world’s leading professional organization for doctors who care for people with cancer. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Cancer research discussed in this podcast is ongoing, so the data described here may change as research progresses. In today’s podcast, Dr. Timothy Gilligan and Liz Salmi will discuss their article “Patient-Clinician Communication Is a Joint Creation: Working Together Toward Well-Being,” from the 2018 ASCO Educational Book. They cover several ways people with cancer and members of their health care team can work together in order to improve their communication, including a study on sharing clinical notes with patients, a recent guideline from ASCO on physician-patient communication, ways to address religion and spirituality, and tips for patients. Dr. Gilligan is an Associate Professor and Medical Oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Center. Ms. Salmi is a brain tumor survivor, and Senior Strategist in Outreach and Communications for OpenNotes. Published annually, the Educational Book is a collection of articles written by ASCO Annual Meeting speakers and oncology experts. Each volume highlights the most compelling research and developments across the multidisciplinary fields of oncology. ASCO would like to thank Dr. Gilligan and Ms. Salmi for discussing this topic. Dr. Gilligan: Hello, my name is Dr. Timothy Gilligan from the Cleveland Clinic. I'm joined today by Liz Salmi of OpenNotes and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In this podcast, we will be sharing some key points from our 2018 ASCO Educational Book article titled “Patient-Clinician Communication Is a Joint Creation: Working Together Toward Well-Being.” I would also note that Dr. Andrea Enzinger from Dana-Farber was an author on that. So, Liz, we were going to start with talking about your piece on this, your work with OpenNotes. And for those who haven't heard of this, the idea is making progress notes openly available to patients so they can read the progress notes about their medical care. Can you talk a little bit more about what OpenNotes is and what's at stake here? Liz Salmi: Sure. Absolutely. Thanks for that intro. And I just want to say my role at OpenNotes—I do outreach and communication work, but, also, I think it's important for the audience to know that I am also a patient. I'm a person living with a malignant brain tumor or brain cancer. And I'm now a 10-year survivor, but I'm still living with active disease. So what I'm talking about today is not just part of my job, but it's also very personal to me. And so what you just kind of gave me a lead-in on, is explaining what OpenNotes is, but I do want to repeat a little bit about that. So OpenNotes is now a national movement that stems from real medical research, and it's a movement dedicated to making healthcare more open and transparent by giving people—or patients—access to their doctors' notes via existing secure online patient portals. And when I say that, I want to make it clear that OpenNotes is not a product, or it's not a piece of software. It's more of just a concept of let's give patients full access to their medical records. And when we talk about OpenNotes, a lot of patients will say, "Well, what is a doctor's note?" Right now, I, as a person, can login to my digital online portal to email with my doctor, or, say, set up appointments, or order prescription refills. And sometimes, after a visit I can see a visit summary of a little