Search all of the Society for Participatory Medicine website:Search

Electronic Medical Records? Yeah, Not So Much

So with all this talk about healthcare technologies and the new budget and Health 2.0, you’d think that electronic medical records (EMRs) were on the rise. Perhaps they are, but as the Associated Press reports, fewer than 2 percent of providers have completely...

Dr. Reuben deeply regrets that this happened!

This is the third post in the unfortunate series about conflicts of interest. You must be kiddin’! That’s all Scott Reuben, MD, the doctor Scientific American calls “a medical Madoff”, had to say after putting the last two handful of nails into...

The Wellsphere Blogging Controversy

You may have heard of the Wellsphere blogging controversy (if not, here’s one take on the issue, and here’s another from a different perspective). In a nutshell, Wellsphere went to bloggers in the health world and asked them if they could syndicate their...

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...

Cyberchondria: Old Wine in New Bottles

Just before Thanksgiving, Microsoft released a study entitled, “Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search.” Ryen White and Eric Horvitz took advantage of a data set that few people have access to (log files from...

Using Aggregate Data to Help Public Health

Public health is different than our personal health. Most people take for granted the role public health agencies play in our lives, but its primary emphasis is tracking disease data across the country in order to prevent a nationwide epidemic or pandemic. Nobody...

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...

Health 2.0 Northeast Meeting Review

I along with e-Patient Dave, Dan Hoch and Danny Sands, attended the second Health 2.0 Northeast meeting in Cambridge, Mass. on Tuesday night (Oct. 7, 2008). It was an initially well-attended event, with up to 150 people who came out to network (old-school style!) and...

New York Times Health Section

The New York Times published an amazing array of health articles yesterday, each one of which is worthy of a discussion on this blog (and not just because we were mentioned in this one). But I also want to take a minute to appreciate the entire online Health section...

For Sale: Revolution Health

Why is Steve Case’s online health venture already looking to sell itself, just a year and a half after it launched? Yet another tale of hubris in the e-health sector. Back in 1999, I left the mental health site I founded — the largest site of its kind at...

Cloud computing puts your health data at risk?

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...

Doctors’ Digital Footprints

Is it “disordered” behavior to Google your doctor? An article in JAMA suggests that doctors be on their guard. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published an article about how doctors should be aware of how they are portrayed online...

Are on-line pharmacies a threat to participatory medicine?

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...

Donate