Just a reminder as the fall conference schedule is in full swing, the Patient Travel Award program is back for 2024! With a generous gift from the Progress for Informatics and Energy Foundation, we have restarted this program for this year and made our first award. We can offer 9 more awards for 2024 of up to $599, so please apply promptly. This award is a benefit available to any member to support attendance at a conference or event that relates to participatory medicine. We only ask that you write a blog in return to share what you have learned with all SPM members. Click here to learn more.

A subcommittee of members is working with the Northeastern University Bouvé College of Health Sciences to hold a half-day conference in Boston this year. Several schools, including nursing, are a part of this collaboration. The conference will focus on what patients, families, and caregivers can do in the wake of getting a new, serious diagnosis and will provide honest discussions of the patient journey, solutions for navigating the healthcare system, patient empowerment, and how elements of participatory medicine can be reflected at both the patient and healthcare professional level. We will be promoting the event soon and hope that members will be able to attend.

We continue to work on developing the concept of developing indexes that will measure the adoption and use of participatory medicine among patients, clinicians, and health care organizations. We have shared an initial “pitch deck” with almost fifty health care experts, advocates, and innovators. All have responded with encouragement and validation of the idea. If you can’t manage what you haven’t measured, we believe creating a participatory medicine index will help build awareness of the value of participatory medicine and help define ways to advance it on an individual and organizational basis. Existing indexes of patient engagement focus heavily on transactions patients experience in a single visit, such as “was your wait time satisfactory?” or “did your clinician listen to you?”. Clinician attitudes toward patients are infrequently measured. While those items that are recently measured are important to understand, it’s also important to measure the longitudinal relationship and collaboration between patient and clinician. Research shows that where patients and clinicians collaborate, costs are lower, mutual satisfaction is higher, and quality is better. We want to measure and track the level of collaboration between patients and clinicians. We are in a significant period of change and innovation in health care. We hope that a participatory medicine index will help us shape the new era we are entering to help make health care more humane for both patient and clinician and advance a productive partnership between them. We will be reaching out to members to ask for your help in developing the participatory medicine indexes soon. We hope you will lend a hand.

We are in the process of looking for a new Journal of Participatory Medicine editor in chief. Susan Woods, MD, MPH and Matthew Hudson, PhD, MPH have stepped down after many years of wonderful work as co-editors in chief. They will be co-editors of a special edition of the Journal that will focus on AI and participatory medicine, which will be their final contribution to the Journal. We thank them for their thoughtful contributions and guidance of this publication. We are deeply grateful and extend our thanks.

Last, we are always looking for committed, roll-up-your-sleeves board members. If you have an interest in joining the board, please contact Mary Hennings or Danny Sands through the Forum. The process is that you’ll be interviewed, then your experience and expertise reviewed by the board to sort out the best match for all. You might be asked to participate in a work group, committee or on the board itself. Please consider this opportunity.

Thank you,
The SPM Board