e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
“Give us our data”:
my talk at the NeHC board meeting
Last Tuesday, June 2, I was on a consumer panel at a board meeting of the National eHealth Collaborative. This is a heady group to be addressing; as this press release says, nine of these people are on the advisory committees that are working directly with David...
e-Patients Demand: Put An End To
Data-Hugging Disorder
“Statistics should be the intellectual sidewalks of a society, and people should be able to build businesses and operate on the side of them" This quote from Hans Rosling is part of a speech where he presented the following: Database-hugging disorder (Dbhd): A well...
For Want of a Surge Protector…
It seems somewhere between highly unlikely and impossible for this to happen in this day and age, but Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis had to turn away patients when a power surge took down its electronic medical records system. Yes, that's right -- our computers...
David Kibbe & Mark Leavitt : Openness vs. Opacity
Background information: The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) is currently in a monopolistic situation since it is, for the last few years, the only entity allowed to certify EHRs. The HITECH act of ARRA mentions specifically the...
Getting health insurance with a pre-existing condition
Thanks to Amy Tenderich (@DiabetesMine) for mentioning this CNN Empowered Patient entry that could be of real use to many: "Tips for getting insurance when you have a pre-existing condition " The tips: Become a group of one If you've been laid off, get COBRA After...
Atul Gawande examines why health costs are high some places and lower others
As soon as you can, stop what you're doing and devote 20-30 minutes to reading Atul Gawande's important new article in the June 1 New Yorker, The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care. I don't claim to be an expert about cost issues but in...
Adopting a Style for Improved Health Outcomes
Not Your Father’s Doctor-Patient Relationship – A Positively Revolutionary Approach In pediatrics, research has shown that not all parenting styles produce equal outcomes. Researchers often categorize parenting styles into four groups according to parents’ level of...
X PRIZE Blog Rally:
$10M for Health Care Innovators
Scott Shreeve, MD, Senior Health Advisor at The X Prize Foundation and frequent THCB contributor, has asked the health care blogosphere to take part in this blog rally in order to raise awareness about the Healthcare X Prize Foundation competition and encourage public...
The power of listening and being heard
This is a special occasion for me, a guest post by Dr. Louise Glaser. Louise is a pediatrician in the Kaiser Permanente system, where among other things she’s Chief of Leadership and Communication Development in the Sacramento area. I met her a year ago at the annual...
Another great reason to be a participatory e-patient
The Boston Globe had a brief interview with me last Monday, and commenter "MikeScanlon" gave a great additional reason to go "e": Doctors are required to respond to a lot of things – health insurance requirements, liability insurance requirements, rules and...
Will The Great Recession Create Millions of e-Patients?
Another post about healthcare "creepware" from Opaque, Inc. While reading the Wall Street Journal health blog, I saw this disturbing piece of information: In a new survey conducted by Mercer, the employee benefits consulting shop, nearly half of the 428 employers...
Participatory Medicine: What Is It For You?
As the meme is now firmly accepted, I thought we ought to have another round of definition crowdsourcing. If you use the term please stop here for a minute and let us know what it means to you. I will summarize the responses and use the results to update the wikipedia...
