e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Participatory Democracy, Participatory Medicine
A sneak preview of my remarks at the "Health 2.0 meets Information Therapy" conference appears on the IxCenterBlog: Participatory Democracy, Participatory Medicine. A good discussion of the issues has already begun there and on The Health Care Blog.
Quick update on moving my data
A few items before I head off to the day job: As my hospital's CIO John Halamka posted Monday, we had a concall Wednesday night. He, Roni Zeiger of Google, my physician Danny Sands and I spoke for an hour about this entire broad topic....
E-Patient Discovers Significant Flaws in System, Spin Doctors Get to Work
It is absolutely amazing to watch the unfolding saga the moment a real patient enters real data into Google Health from his hospital's medical records. The way the marketing folks tell us, this is a seamless exercise that gets you up and running on personal health...
Electronic Health Records Raise Doubt
The Boston Globe takes note of the morass that is Google Health when connecting it to your medical records, as recounted earlier by our own e-Patient Dave here on e-patients.net.
Encoding information is a key part of I.T.
Do you know what's in your medical record? Does it contain mistakes or omissions? The extraordinary response to our April 1 post about data transfer from PatientSite to Google Health (86 comments so far) made us realize that the time has come for patients to take...
Surprise: doc finds it’s useful having records online
NY Times: Rural Doctor Finds Benefits in Electronics. I know all the experts have a thousand reasons why "it's not that simple," but I do this stuff all the time in my day job and I don't know what's such a big freakin mystery. Having data online works. Look: that's...
The I in IT stands for Information
I've been thinking a lot about where to take the discussion that's exploded on my post about moving my data from PatientSite into Google Health. I'm hardly an IT guru, but as I said, I do work with data at my day job. And before we proceed, there's something I think...
When is “Information Therapy” Simply Learning?
I sometimes wonder whether we complicate things that are pretty simple, by assigning more labels and new terms to things that have perfectly good labels already. For instance, I once thought I knew what "information therapy" meant. It meant a doctor or other...
You’re Not Crazy After All
Had chemotherapy and weeks after the treatment has ended, still feeling not quite yourself? You're not alone. The memory and cognitive problems after receiving chemotherapy is known as "chemobrain." As Ellen Clegg notes in The Cloud Over Chemotherapy, finally the...
An angry veterinarian says “I don’t understand…”
From my wife: I truly don't understand why human medicine finds it is so difficult to put medical records on the computer. Veterinary medicine has had that ability at least for the last 10-15 years. An example is the Idexx Cornerstone Veterinary Practice Management...
A wonderful story of participatory medicine
Amy Marcus, in today's WSJ, wrote a powerful article about a mom moving medical mountains to help her twin daughters survive a rare and deadly disease. Entitled "A Mom Brokers Treatment for Her Twins' Fatal Illness. Bucking Scientific Convention, Ms. Hempel Gets...
Imagine someone had been managing your data, and then you looked.
This is a complex post, so don’t jump to any conclusions. Two weeks ago (gad, was it that long?) I asked you to think about something for a few days: Imagine that for all your life, and your parents’ lives, your money had been managed by other people who had extensive...
