Yesterday, in Honoring the memory of “Doc Tom” Ferguson, ten years after his death, we started a series of posts to mark his untimely demise and look back on his work.

As we noted, at his death he was working on a project funded by Robert Wood Johnson’s Pioneer Portfolio to document the reality of, and the rationale behind, the e-patient movement. Today, a full decade later, the movement is barely known, but we’ve made progress: in many circles (not all), patient engagement and empowerment are recognized as a growing reality, and in some countries policy is changing to support it.

In the coming days we’re going to walk through this document chapter by chapter. If you want to follow along, please download it: it’s 129 pages in English, and the original text (not updated) is in Spanish, 148 pages.

Here’s the table of contents:

Foreword by Lee Rainie and Susannah Fox
Preface
Introduction
1. Hunters and Gatherers of Medical Information
2. Content, Connectivity, and Communityware
3. Patient-Centered Networks: Connected Communities of Care
4. The Surprisingly Complex World of e-Communities
5. e-Patients as Medical Researchers
6. Learning from e-Patients
7. The Autonomous Patient and the Reconfiguration of Medical Knowledge
Afterword–2013 by Charles Smith, Terry Graedon, Joe Graedon, Alan Green,        John Grohol, and Daniel Sands, in collaboration with the SPM Founders’ group
About the Author
About the e-Patient Scholars Working Group

Special recognition to SPM members Elia Gabarrón and Luis Fernández Luque for creating the Spanish edition! As we said in the post announcing it, Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the world.