e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Dennis Quaid on Electronic Medical Records (CBS Sunday Morning)
Actor Dennis Quaid has become an advocate for electronic medical records. In 2007 his 12 day old twins received a massive accidental overdose (10,000 units of heparin instead of 10 units), a near-fatal error that could have been prevented by the kind of bar code...
HIPAA’s Broken Promise
If you hate HIPAA, it's your lucky day. Paul Ohm is handing you ammunition in his article, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization.” His argument: our current information privacy structure is a house built on sand. “Computer...
Regina Holliday’s mural is in the BMJ
We've written here before about Regina Holliday (follow her blog), whose husband Fred died June 17. In today's edition of the British Medical Journal, her mural is the picture of the week: Ted Eytan MD took the picture and posted it on Flickr. Today he sent this email...
e-Patients and Participatory Physicians Creating Podcasts
I can barely contain my happiness (oh heck, I'll let it spill) at this: participatory patients and physicians creating educational content, using free internet software tools, and posting it for people to read (free) around the world. I'm a member of the ACOR kidney...
Senator Ted Kennedy was an e-patient
CNN's Elizabeth Cohen makes a compelling case in her column today: How to get Kennedy-esque health care on your budget. Anyone with internet access can gather the information they need to make better health decisions, as e-Patient Dave and Karen Parles did, and refuse...
Age of Participatory Medicine
Kevin Kruse posted a video yesterday which includes this line: The age of participatory medicine has begun. It's a promo for e-Patients Connections 2009, a conference to be held in Philadelphia this October, but also has good citations (ahem, including my reports). ...
Social Media’s Promise for Public Health
Federal agencies can, and should, be the first responders to health questions. Social media can help. That's my summary of presentations from last week's National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media conference, where I had the sense, once again, of...
e-Patient Training Topic: National Article Reports Relative Risk, Not Raw Data.
Important update: it turns out the writer did get it right, and this was an editing error at the Boston Globe. See my comment August 17. ----- As empowered, engaged patients we have a responsibility to evaluate the articles we read. A case in point is this week’s...
How to Rein in Medical Costs
You know you're going to get a pretty interesting debate about healthcare costs when George Lundberg offers his advice on how to control health care costs right now. A well thought-out piece and one deserving of everyone's time to read it. Costs can be reigned in, if...
Trying to Measure the Quality of Health Information on the Internet: Is It Time to Move On?
Patient safety is important, and the safety of internet health data has been an ongoing concern for ages. We now have a great addition to the literature: "Trying to Measure the Quality of Health Information on the Internet: Is It Time to Move On?" It's an editorial in...
KQED examines realities of Canadian healthcare
Good piece on NPR this morning about what a KQED correspondent found when she went to Canada and talked to citizens and doctors about their experience of wait times. Click to go to their site and listen. One might ask, what does this have to do with patient...
e-Patients: a high tech group wants our input (gasp!) on connected health. DO IT!
I'm not making this up; it's a wonderful thing. MassMEDIC, the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council, is looking at the future of "connected health" devices. They've got a survey that's been given to all kinds of industry and policy people, and now, blow me...