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Social Healthcare: “Medicine in the Age of Twitter”

Physician Pauline Chen writes about “Medicine in the Age of Twitter” for the New York Times. The article suggests the need for our upcoming peer-reviewed Journal of Participatory Medicine:…a quick scan through peer-reviewed journals reveals only a...

e-Patients Demand: Put An End To
Data-Hugging Disorder

“Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them” This quote from Hans Rosling is part of a speech where he presented the following: Database-hugging disorder (Dbhd): A...

For Want of a Surge Protector…

It seems somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible for this to happen in this day and age, but Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis had to turn away patients when a power surge took down its electronic medical records system. Yes, that’s right — our...

David Kibbe & Mark Leavitt : Openness vs. Opacity

Background information: The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) is currently in a monopolistic situation since it is, for the last few years, the only entity allowed to certify EHRs. The HITECH act of ARRA mentions specifically the...

X PRIZE Blog Rally:
$10M for Health Care Innovators

Scott Shreeve, MD, Senior Health Advisor at The X Prize Foundation and frequent THCB contributor, has asked the health care blogosphere to take part in this blog rally in order to raise awareness about the Healthcare X Prize Foundation competition and encourage public...

Participatory Medicine: What Is It For You?

As the meme is now firmly accepted, I thought we ought to have another round of definition crowdsourcing. If you use the term please stop here for a minute and let us know what it means to you. I will summarize the responses and use the results to update the wikipedia...

Meaningful Use: The Elephant IS In The Room

Comparative Effectiveness:  a  comparison of the impact of different options that are available for treating a given  medical condition for a particular set of patients. Such studies may compare  similar treatments, such as competing drugs, or they may analyze very...

PLEASE, No More Magical Thinking in HIT!

Magical thinking: the ability to draw conclusions that are based on a person’s desire for what reality should be, not necessarily upon what reality actually is. Cargo Cult HIT:  Concepts in HIT that follow all the apparent precepts and forms of evidence-based...

The Markle Foundation’s work on Meaningful Use

Last night I posted my own thoughts on the definition of “meaningful use,” a term that will have significant impact on our next-generation medical records systems. To me it’s vital that the term be defined to include full access for you and me...

Health 2.0 meets Ix: The Rise of the Patient Voices

I have been following with real interest the notes and discussions about the Health 2.0/Ix conference that took place in Boston last week. I am not willing to get involved in this discussion because in some ways I think it missed the most important aspect of the...

Remembering Doc Tom

I never knew “Doc Tom” Ferguson; he died three years ago this week, April 14, 2006. That was nine months before my diagnosis and 21 months before I discovered the movement that he founded. That team, with later additions, is here. Tom, I think of you...

A wonderful story of participatory medicine

Amy Marcus, in today’s WSJ,  wrote a powerful article about a mom moving medical mountains to help her twin daughters survive a rare and deadly disease. Entitled “A Mom Brokers Treatment for Her Twins’ Fatal Illness. Bucking Scientific Convention,...

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