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Caregivers: a celebration

Becoming a caregiver seems to change people as health information consumers. They turn up the volume on every information source. They track down information as if it is a competitive sport.* They don’t let pay walls or office hours stand in their way....
How do (older, lower-income) patients learn?

How do (older, lower-income) patients learn?

Rebecka Sexton of the Center For Innovation at the Carilion Clinic in Roanoke, VA, emailed a great question and I’d like to share it more widely: We are working on a project here at Carilion on chronic diseases related to Population Health Management related to...

Health Online 2013: survey data as vital sign

Survey data is a snapshot of a population, a moment captured in numbers, like vital signs: height, weight, temperature, blood pressure, etc. People build trend lines and watch for changes, shifting strategies as they make educated guesses about what’s going on....

The Rise of the e-Patient

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project,  presented this wonderful overview of the Project’s health findings at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, CA, on January 12. The Rise of the e-Patient View more presentations from Pew Research...

The Power of Mobile

Prepared for Mayo Transform 2010: Thinking Differently About Health Care (video now available). Ten years ago, I wrote the Pew Internet Project’s first report on the impact of the internet on health care, calling it “The Online Health Care Revolution.” Back then, the...

Mobile, Social Health at the National Library of Medicine

Update: The NLM released new widgets on July 14, along with a redesigned MedlinePlus site. (Read @eagledawg’s take on these new tools, as well as her response to this post.) Speaking to the senior staff of the National Library of Medicine last week was like...

Health 2.0 Europe: A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway wrote that Paris is a moveable feast, not fixed in time or place. I think that describes great gatherings of any kind, including great conferences, which begin before the first speaker takes the stage and don’t end simply because the...

Access is (almost) everything

Or: Why health geeks should pay attention to internet access geeks. The Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Project and Internet Project just released an in-depth look at internet penetration across racial and ethnic categories in the U.S.: Latinos Online, 2006-2008...

The Social Life of Health Information

The Pew Internet/California HealthCare Foundation report, The Social Life of Health Information, is packed with new findings from a survey of 2,253 adults, including 502 cell-phone interviews, conducted in either English or Spanish. We spent a bundle of money on...

Mobile, social technology and the impact on health care

Fard Johnmar interviewed me about internet adoption, the use of social technologies among minority groups, and my hope that e-patients’ “passion, knowledge, and ingenuity is brought forward no matter what else is planned for health care reform.”...

NIH Summit on Health Disparities

NIH is sponsoring a summit this week, The Science of Eliminating Health Disparities. I heard about it from Mary Brophy Marcus’s article in USA Today and I found this press release online, but I haven’t seen other coverage of the event. If you spot stories...
41% of Adults are “Activated Patients”

41% of Adults are “Activated Patients”

The Center for Studying Health System Change has released another information-packed report, How Engaged Are Consumers in Their Health and Health Care, and Why Does It Matter.   The researchers created a “Patient Activation Measure” and apparently 41% of...

Crowdsourcing a Survey: Health Topics

The Pew Internet Project will conduct a national telephone survey this fall about the internet’s impact on health and health care. One of the first tasks is to look at our tried and true “trend” questions and decide which ones we should repeat as is...

Safety Net Populations

I recently spoke at a workshop entitled Patient Online Access in the Safety Net. (Check out these related posts.) Click image to view full size original. The organizers, Ted Eytan and Veenu Aulakh, asked me to create a participatory presentation, which definitely...

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