e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
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...
What do YOU think they mean by “health reform”?
After hearing about 800 million mentions of "healthcare reform" in the past couple of months, this weekend I visited my normal (not-HC-geek) family in Maryland for Mom's 80th birthday. (Woohoo! Large clan descends, six siblings and most of the grandlings.) Inevitably...
Guest post on The Ideal Doctor/Patient Relationship (Kent Bottles, MD)
Guest post by Kent Bottles, M.D., President of ICSI. Preface: The Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement is a Minnesota-based non-profit that "brings together diverse groups to transform the health care system so that it delivers patient-centered and value-driven...
A Participatory Medicine Story
The nascent field of Participatory Medicine is currently in the "debating and defining" stage.   It has been tentatively defined by the steering group of the Journal of Participatory Medicine as: ...a cooperative model of health care that encourages and expects...
Shared Kismet: Wikipedia and the NIH
The National Institutes of Health hosted a Wikipedia Academy today to train scientists, communications staff, and other NIH staffers in how to contribute to what has become a top source for health information in the U.S. (For more details, please see the NIH press...
Civil rights activist Dorothy Tillman vindicated
a year after arrest for demanding medical records
Important addition 7/16/09Â 6:40 pm EDT: Be sure to read the HIPAA clarification by commenter "SLC" below, and any subsequent discussion. Dorothy Tillman was requesting her aunt's records, not her own. This doesn't change the need (IMO), but it does put a different...
E-patients in U.S. News
U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals guide features 3 articles of particular interest to e-patients: Getting Medical Advice on the Web from Other Patients Would You Share Your Health Information Online? Great Medicine Needs Committed Patients
I’m sick of hearing Washington talk about savings “over ten years”
I am sick of hearing politicians and money-making parties talk about savings projections "over ten years." It's STUPID. We're stupid if we listen. Nothing (and I mean nothing) happens as projected ten years ago, not even five. It's fiction; it's a bogus way to inflate...
The Economist picks up the meme again
I suspect this has caught the attention of many of our readers, but I'll emphasize it anyway. The Economist often comments on technology and health-care. Recently, they talked up Health 2.0 a bit. What I was most struck by is the handful of comments. Most focused...
Participatory Medicine at PdF09: Can we get a do-over?
The poli-tech tribe gathered in New York last week for the Personal Democracy Forum and, as Craig Newmark put it, welcomed "our new nerd overlords." Esther Dyson, Jamie Heywood, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), and I were asked to take on a breakout panel entitled, "From...
