by e-Patient Dave | Apr 13, 2015
Friday evening I got a tweet from SPM member Sherry Reynolds about something that had just happened in Washington. Today it unfolded. (Don’t miss her comment, too, about the history of this issue and her role in it.) Change can provoke upset. Technological...
by e-Patient Dave | Apr 10, 2015
Perhaps it’s time for an argument about how we’re doing this. Many of us in the Society for Participatory Medicine have long noted that what we’re up to here is nothing less than full-bore culture change. In my own speeches I often note that culture...
by e-Patient Dave | Apr 8, 2015
National Survey Also Shows 87% Think Health Information Exchange Should be Free First paragraph updated next day In case you missed it last month, there was an unprecedented, huge moment in SPM’s history – we collaborated in a national survey of...
by e-Patient Dave | Feb 17, 2015
Dr. Donald Lindberg, long-time director of the National Library of Medicine, is surely the single most-quoted authority from “Doc Tom” Ferguson’s e-Patient White Paper. In almost every speech I’ve given in the past five years I’ve used...
by e-Patient Dave | Feb 11, 2015
This is a great week for SPM, for our colleagues at the Stanford Medicine X conference, and for everyone else who’s been working for years to shift medicine’s thinking about the role of the patient: Yesterday the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal)...
by Nick Dawson | Jan 31, 2015
Last Friday, 200 patients, advocates, scientists, doctors and researchers gathered at the White House to hear President Obama’s launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative. According to the President, precision medicine...
by e-Patient Dave | Dec 3, 2014
Edited an hour later – added Business Impact section at end Healthcare providers who are tracking patient experience and patient satisfaction, take note: a new study reported yesterday in Science Daily provides evidence that we patients really like it when we...
by Ileana Balcu | Oct 22, 2014
Wikipedia says “Participatory medicine is a movement in which networked patients shift from being mere passengers to responsible drivers of their health, and … providers encourage and value them as full partners.” That movement gets a big boost in...
by Michael Millenson | Jun 16, 2014
The founders of SPM were saddened this weekend to learn of the death, in a private plane crash, of Richard Rockefeller, longtime friend of “Doc Tom” Ferguson. Rockefeller was credited in Ferguson’s white paper as “a White Paper Advisor.”...
by e-Patient Dave | Jun 10, 2014
Regular readers know that this blog has long advocated for patient access to, and engagement with, the medical record. In the past 2-3 years we’ve especially advocated for OpenNotes, in which patients can see their primary’s actual visit notes. At my...
by e-Patient Dave | May 27, 2014
SPM member Richard Anderson @RiAnder has a lot of experience helping to found and develop another organization’s local chapters around the world. Because of a nightmare experience with the U.S. healthcare system, he has decided to work to change that system, and...
by Marge Benham-Hutchins | May 21, 2014
An international conference addressing information technology and communication in health (ITCH) will be held February 26 – March 1, 2015 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Professor Stephen Hawking’s statement, “we learned to talk, we learned to listen, we...
by e-Patient Dave | Mar 26, 2014
It’s five years since the ARRA/HITECH legislation was passed that pretty much mandates that American medicine has to computerize. Policies created since then have been enormously effective at moving adoption forward. We still need vast improvements of the user...
by e-Patient Dave | Mar 5, 2014
Care designers and fans of patient-centered care, listen up: a hat tip to Danish friend Malene Louise Djurhuus Laubinger for this, from The Guardian: How collaborating with patients improves hospital care. We’ve often said on this blog that participatory...
by e-Patient Dave | Mar 2, 2014
We often say here that clinicians should welcome activated patients. Hand in glove with that, we must also say: Yo, patients: get activated! Know what works, and act on it! Huzzah to Swedish SPM member and Parkinson’s patient Sara Riggare for this, on Facebook,...
by e-Patient Dave | Jan 1, 2014
The next day I made a correction per Dick Morris’s comment, and toned down some of my adjectives to be more suitable outside of our private listserv. Dr. Bratton, of course we welcome dialog. In our Society for Participatory Medicine, part of our work is to...
by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. | Dec 19, 2013
Go ahead and type in virtually any health or mental health condition into Google. Heck, even try a popular medication or two. Time and time again, you’ll notice a reliable trend — 2 or 3 of the top 10 search results are nearly always going to be WebMD. But...
by e-Patient Dave | Dec 19, 2013
As we’ve said endlessly here (and in Washington), one of the key enablers of better healthcare is access to information. For that subject there’s no more important job in the world than America’s National Coordinator for Health IT, who runs ONC...
by e-Patient Dave | Nov 26, 2013
Susannah Fox of Pew Research had an important new study published today about the highest cost part of the healthcare budget: patients with one or more chronic conditions. If you care about the suffering of patients with never-ending conditions or the suffering of the...
by e-Patient Dave | Mar 4, 2013
Update March 24: I’m retitling this post, and putting it on hold, pending resolution of important concerns raised by other members of our Society for Participatory Medicine. In particular, see Adrian Gropper’s posts on The Health Care Blog. This is almost...
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