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A thousand points of pain

Cross-posted from my own blog, and then some E-patients, listen up. We have work to do, work we can do. For the past year I’ve been learning what I can about the American healthcare system. I started this not as an “injured” patient but as someone...

An e-patient call to arms

E-patients, this is a call to action. Now. I want you to go express yourself on Paul Levy’s blog. Most readers of health policy blogs know what a costly, inefficient mess healthcare in America has become. Paul Levy would like the people in his business to work...

Engage With Grace

The following post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace Team. Here’s an image of the slide, and below is the post that many are sharing today. (The original PowerPoint slide is linked within the post.) Please see comments at end. We make...

Making sense of health statistics

Cross-posted from my own blog, with a late p.s. from this morning’s paper When John Grohol read my post the other day about evidence-based medicine, he steered me to a paper worth reading: Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. (Update Dec...

How Good Are Doctor Rating Sites?

Ruth Given has written a paper entitled, MD Rating Websites: Current State of the Space and Future Prospects (PDF), that was recently published on THCB. It’s a 39-page informal analysis (with an emphasis placed on informal) that takes a fairly good and...

Complex Patient Choices on Life or Death

“There are certain choices patients make that I have never understood, choices that from my perspective as a doctor seem to undermine their very chances for survival. Or at least undermine the efforts doctors, nurses and even complete strangers make on their behalf....

Mobilizing Support for the CIS

I just heard from Gary Kreps, Professor of Health Communication at George Mason University and e-patient pioneer, reporting about drastic cutbacks to the Cancer Information Service programs. Excellent up-to-date information is an important foundation for Participatory...

Eyeballs AND Data, Please

Jeff Howe’s blog post, “Can We Crowdsource Medical Expertise?” elicited the following comment from Daniel Reda of CureTogether.com: “Personally, just like I have batting averages, crash test ratings and historical earnings, I’d like to...

Interview: Mary Matthiesen, Conversations for Life

Mary Matthiesen, founder of Conversations for Life, has 17 years of front-line experience in healthcare, end of life care, and executive leadership. She’s a transpersonal educator, coach, and community facilitator, raising awareness and promoting social change...

Medpedia – where are the patients??

Medpedia has gotten a lot of publicity in the past week. Considering that Wikipedia has disavowed* usefulness for patients, Medpedia sounds like a potentially great idea. * See Jon’s correction in Comments. –EPD But when I saw their home page it literally...

Take control of your images!
Where to get DICOM readers

Update: links to free viewers for Windows, Mac, and Linux, for the DICOM image format used for scan imagesBackground information on DICOM, and the Wikipedia entryLinks to sample images, so you can experiment with a viewer Why I’m writing about this: Linux guru...

Observations of Daily Living and Personal Health Records

Following up on Gilles Frydman’s comments about Observations of Daily Living (ODL), we found another ODL post by e-Patients Group ally Kevin Kelly at The Quantified Self:Detailed quantifiable self-observation has a new handle. It is called ODL or Observations of...

An e-Patient discusses how technology helped him

In February 2007 the Washington DC PBS station, WETA, produced a pilot program for a series called “Healthcare 360,” produced by George Mason University and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The pilot is about “Health IT and how it...

CaringBridge, CarePages: community support sites

This weekend the Associated Press is publishing a story about CaringBridge and a similar site, CarePages. It relates the experience of several users, including my community and family during my cancer adventure last year (see my CaringBridge journal.). Newcomers: if...

Consumers talk back to CNN’s Empowered Patient

For several informative empowered patient stories, see the Comments at bottom of this post. CNN’s Empowered Patient column, by medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, contains good, if not groundbreaking, advice, plus the occasional exaggeration or misconception. For...

Randy Pausch, empowered patient / participatory medicine

Chapter 12 of Randy Pausch’s best-selling book The Last Lecture opens with a classic anecdote of what it looks like when an empowered patient practices participatory medicine with an equally participatory care team: CT scans revealed I had pancreatic cancer, and it...

Consumers? Wha?

Update 5/19: Wonderful news! Today I was invited to represent the consumer perspective at this event! Kudos and thanks – I intend to add real value. Investors and disrupters to the alert! MassTLC (the Mass Technology Leadership Council) is running a meeting on...

Patients Rating Hospitals? What Next!?

Dr. Robert Wachter has an interesting essay over at THCB entitled, Should Patient Satisfaction Scores Be Adjusted for Where Patients Shop? As health care in the U.S. continues to move in the direction of tailoring itself to patient satisfaction, the question becomes...

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