by Susannah Fox | Nov 16, 2008
Nancy B. Finn is a journalist with an expertise in the implementation of digital communications in health care and shared this story about personal health records: I was recently hospitalized. Fortunately I did not have to go through the emergency department but was...
by Gilles Frydman | Nov 12, 2008
Information Silo: An information silo is a management system incapable of reciprocal operation with other, related management systems… “Information silo” is a pejorative expression that is useful for describing the absence of operational reciprocity....
by Gilles Frydman | Oct 30, 2008
Too many years witnessing the same thing. First in the ACOR system. Then in many conferences about eHealth, e-Patients and now Health 2.0 and the Connected Health symposium at Harvard Medical School. Why is an entire segment of the US population almost completely...
by e-Patient Dave | Oct 28, 2008
Where have we heard this story before? A friend of mine slipped on the sidewalk recently and broke her hip. She had surgery in one of the best hospitals in the country. But it [wasn’t their staff, it] was her grown daughter who noticed that she was having an...
by e-Patient Dave | Oct 27, 2008
This post is prompted by a horrid subject: how do we as a society deal with one of the worst possible events – a death in our healthcare system? The immediate topic is a 37 year old woman who died last week at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). An article...
by e-Patient Dave | Oct 24, 2008
What do we think of THIS?? An op-ed piece in the NY Times:Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland Athletics, suggests using baseball-style number-crunching to improve healthcare, with Newt Gingrich and John Kerry co-authoring the piece. Some snips: “Remarkably, a doctor...
by Christine Gray | Oct 20, 2008
Gina Kolata’s must-read article, “The Scan That Didn’t Scan,” in last week’s Science Times points out vast differences in the quality of MRIs as well as vast differences in the expertise of the radiologists who interpret them. Patients...
by e-Patient Dave | Oct 19, 2008
Here’s an unpleasant aspect of patient empowerment: we need to be aware that sometimes our providers will heap treatments on us that aren’t necessary – and, sometimes, treatments we’ve specifically said we don’t want. Paul Grundy MD,...
by e-Patient Dave | Oct 16, 2008
As an empowered patient I’m willing to go to the ends of the earth to help the medical community get beyond the famed “culture of blame,” so everyone involved can learn from errors. Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center had a wrong site...
by e-Patient Dave | Sep 18, 2008
In today’s Windows Secrets, Stuart Johnston writes about the pros and cons of having our health data out on the Internet, as proposed by Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. Quotes: “Selling prescription records is a multibillion-dollar-a-year...
by Susannah Fox | Sep 4, 2008
The Journal of the National Cancer Institute published health risk data in a way that only a researcher would love (Reason.com’s Hit & Run blog links to the subscription-only charts here in case you want to marvel at the ugliness). Luckily The New York...
by e-Patient Dave | Sep 2, 2008
[Video at http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1418520436 is no longer available] A week ago Ted Eytan posted about a Consumer Reports Health blog post, including a video of a patient who is unable to get health insurance because of an error in...
by Jon Lebkowsky | Jul 29, 2008
The e-Patients Group has been discussing Shannon Brownlee’s book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, which tells how the logic of the U.S. healthcare system works against coordination and effective treatment. “Between 20 and...
by Dan Hoch | Jul 10, 2008
In a piece in the New York Times 7/9/08 (Abuses are Found in Online Sales of Medication) a report (also out Weds) from Columbia University is described. According to the authors, 85% of online sites that sell medications directly to the public do not require a...
by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | May 14, 2008
If you didn’t hear, lots and lots of people snooped into celebrities’ medical records in L.A. — the number of people who’ve been caught just at the UCLA Medical Center is up to 68! Worse yet, these are electronic medical records, you know,...
by e-Patient Dave | Apr 5, 2008
I want to introduce a term: “serial referral delays.” I assert that serial referral delays are harm, and they’re a metric we can track at any level from individual hospital to the entire nation or planet. First, a little discussion, then “how...
by e-Patient Dave | Mar 18, 2008
Corrected 3/23/08: The hospital does have online patient records, though they don’t include CT/MRI or mammogram results. See link and details below. This one strikes close to home, landing a year after removal of my own cancerous kidney … plus, a year...
by Alan Greene | Jan 15, 2008
In November 2007, Scott Haig, MD, an orthopedic surgeon and medical columnist for TIME, wrote an article for the magazine called “When the Patient is a Googler”. He described a patient of his he called Susan, whom he felt was emblematic of patients who research...
by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | Dec 7, 2007
You’d think that any state that boasts a city like Boston that has as many teaching hospitals and world-class hospitals as Boston would be one of the best cities to get ill in and partake of that excellent medical care. Well, you’d be wrong. According to a...
by Charlie Smith | Oct 17, 2007
Today I heard a story on NPR about a new “superbug” that caused ear infections in children that were resistant to all currently recommended antibiotics used to treat this infection. This reminded me that antibiotics are being over used. This is, in part,...
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