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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...

In the Spin II: You and Your Billing Code

Pass the Valium! Previously on e-Patients.net I recounted the crazy-making quest for a second opinion on an abnormal mammogram (microcalicifications) as per the advice of New York Times health columnist Jane E. Brody, a breast cancer survivor.  The gynecologist who...

Personalized Medicine, the Next Frontier

Nancy B. Finn is a journalist with an expertise in the implementation of digital communications in health care. This is her second guest post on e-patients.net: When an individual patient visits his or her doctor with a problem, traditional clinical diagnosis is made...

Virtual Participatory Medicine Town Meeting

On Friday Senator Tom Daschle announced a campaign to get input from the public about what healthcare reform should look like. “The Transition will host Health Care Community Discussions across the Country over the holidays this December to help his Policy Team...

A Fatally Flawed Medical Educational Model

This week, many news outlets reported on how residents should be given 5 hours of sleep after working 16 hours straight. Think about that for a moment. In what other job — any job in the world — would it be acceptable to even use the term “after...

“I can buy a damn good amputation…”

Paul Grundy MD, of IBM, chair of PCPCC, is interviewed in the current Crain’s Benefits Outlook, a business publication about employee benefit programs. This quote alone is worth the price of admission: I can buy a damn good amputation for my diabetic, but what I...

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...

Blogging to Save a Father’s Life

Yesterday, RocketBoom founder Andrew Baron took to the blogosphere to round up support in his efforts to get a rare drug approved for use in treating his father. His father was diagnosed with a very bad form of cancer called multiple myeloma and his dad’s doctor...

Taxpayer Access: The NIH Public Access Policy

Every year, the U.S. federal government funds more than $29 billion in biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The research, which inspires about 80,000 individual articles (each year), is then published in journals that only subscribers...

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...

Not Just a Pretty Picture

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...

What’s in *your* MIB?

[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...

Steal these slides

Click images to view full size originals. Last weekend I stumbled across the “attic” of Tom Ferguson MD, who was the “George Washington of patient empowerment,” as CNN put it this month, citing his work since 1975 to create a world of freedom...

Statistics, Genetics, and Playing the Lottery

I learned two important lessons in a statistics course I took in college: 1) don’t play the lottery; 2) be skeptical of statistics, especially nice-looking charts and graphs. Yes, I did grow up to be a major purveyor of statistics, but I think it’s a good...

CCHIT, PHR and the Lack of e-Patient Representation

When Google Health was launched, a few weeks ago, all the onus was put on the privacy issue. So much so that we may have lost focus on other issues that are of real importance to the future of e-Patients (that means you and me and everybody else you know!). For...

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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