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Dealing – together – with medical error

The Running A Hospital blog has another discussion of dealing with medical error. This time, the hospital has opened up an error of its own (a wrong side surgery) for examination by the Open School of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Sample comments: From...

Doctors Say One Thing, Patients Hear Another

The Boston Globe has a revealing article about a study published in Annals of Internal Medicine where patients thought that a heart stent would help prevent another heart attack. But doctors had only told patients that it would relieve future chest pain. How can such...

Job openings at ONC for State HIE

Claudia Williams at ONC has job openings for “a couple of talented folks” to add to the high-energy team, to work on State HIE. Details: (HIE is Heath Information Exchange. The State HIE program is described here.) Claudia says:...

Caremark, Prescriptions and Personal Information

A friend of mine, Ms. S., recently had an unsettling experience with a company called Caremark (the parent company of pharmacy CVS), whom she fills her prescriptions through. She was reordering a prescription refill she buys through the mail, and needed to pay for it....

“Are You Safe?” patient safety awareness video

Today I’m participating in a workshop, “Engaging Minority Communities in Safer Healthcare,” organized by MITSS (Medically Induced Trauma Support Services), a Boston non-profit I’ve written about before. The current speaker is Lisa...

A Troubled Trifecta: Peer Review, Academia & Tenure

We welcome Peter Frishauf as an author on our blog. Peter is on the Editorial Board [brief bio] of our Society’s Journal of Participatory Medicine, and as described below, has already authored some important material on this subject. His first post here is...

Rheingold, Nelson, and Engelbart

Howard Rheingold has shared video of a backyard discussion he had with technology pioneers Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson when they dropped by for dinner, along with Howard’s wife Judy and Nelson’s wife Marlene Mallicoat. Brief but intense discussion of the...

Should Patients Read Doctor’s Notes? Wrong Question.

When you have a doctor’s appointment, and she makes some notes and later formalizes them for your medical record, would you like read them?  There’s been debate over the years about whether patients should read the notes that doctors write about them and their health...

Medical Self-Care: The Doc Tom interview in Mother Earth News

Next in our series of posts about our founder Doc Tom. Previous time capsules: 1980 and 1985. Come, ye economics buffs and algebra fans; get out your pencils and solve for x, n, and XX: Whatever else the year 19XX is remembered for, it will — without a doubt — go down...

Living N=1

If you haven’t listened to the Patient Voices series on The New York Times site, let me be the first to recommend it. I spend quite a bit of time writing up survey data, working with moderately large respondent pools (N=2,253 is the number of people who...

Patient Communities: Which Way Forward?

If you were designing a disease treatment system from scratch, bringing together clinicians, patients, researchers, and advocates, what platform would you use to take advantage of the community created by this umbrella group? This isn’t just some health geek...

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