e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Patient to doctor: “Why aren’t you harder on me?”
A joint post by e-Patient Dave and Dr. Danny Sands, written from alternating points of view. Danny: An important moment happened a few months ago during office hours - important because it brought a profound shift in Dave's view of the doctor-patient relationship. And...
VA data glitch mimics MIT’s
Bob Brewin writes today in NextGov that the VA discovered a glitch in a system interface that could display the wrong patient's information under peak load circumstances. The VA handled it in an exemplary fashion: they immediately issued a safety alert and shut down...
Healthcare journalists point out difficulty of using Joint Commission’s hospital quality site
Empowered patients know they're responsible for their choice of care providers. We usually follow our clinicians' advice, but we take responsibility for it. That's hard when a quality agency obscures its findings. So IÂ object to a reality reported this week by AHCJ,...
All Together Now: The Internet Does Not Replace Health Professionals
The March 4 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine includes a letter from Brad Hesse, Richard Moser, and Lila Rutten, three National Cancer Institute researchers whose work is a continual inspiration to me. Their analysis of data from the Health Information...
Designing for Better Health
This is a banner week for people who think good design contributes to better health. On Monday, DiabetesMine and the California HealthCare Foundation launched the 2010 DiabetesMine Design Challenge. Last year the contest garnered more than 150 entries and awarded a...
E-Patient Erin Proves a Point
Erin Turner recently wrote: When I arrived at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota a few weeks ago, I was asked: "Who referred you to us?" My answer was not traditional: "Twitter." (Read her full story on the SpectrumScience blog. And take that, 2.0 doubters!)
What do YOU want from the Society for Participatory Medicine?
We (the people on our banner graphic) are at the annual e-patients.net retreat - which, this year, is the board meeting of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Whether or not you're a member yet (join here), we want to know: what do YOU want the Society to do? Our...
Testimony submitted to the Adoption/Certification Workgroup for its Feb 25 meeting
As I've noted recently, this Thursday I'm on a stakeholder panel at a meeting of the Adoption/Certification Workgroup, which is part of the Federal Health IT Policy Committee. As noted in my previous post, this is a busy day, and each of us gets only 5-7 minutes to...
“Alone we are rare. Together we are strong.”
Rare Disease Day 2/28/10
One profound shift in healthcare enabled by the internet is the Web's ability to be a common platform for huge numbers of low-volume diseases. This is the "long tail" effect that makes Amazon and eBay a success, selling vast numbers of items you never would have seen...
Panelist questions for ONC’s 2/25 hearing on EHR patient safety issues
I wrote last Wednesday about some background material for a panel I'll be attending Thursday, as part of the government's process to encourage adoption of electronic medical records. In the current administration all such discussions are wide open to the public. Here...
Proposal for a health data system to support urgent cancer patients and wounded warriors
Denny Porter is executive-in-residence at the HIMSS Foundation, Institute for e-Health Policy. I met him in Washington last month at the eHealth Initiative's annual conference, where I was on a panel. Great guy, and I love this proposal: a Federal Health Records...
Some people just won’t take death for an answer.
We often talk here about empowered patients' struggles to get - or even create - the care they need. Usually we're talking about it in a medical sense. But as far too many people know, sometimes there are other obstacles. Laurie Todd is, to me, an outstanding example...
