e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
A thousand points of pain
Cross-posted from my own blog, and then some E-patients, listen up. We have work to do, work we can do. For the past year I've been learning what I can about the American healthcare system. I started this not as an "injured" patient but as someone who benefitted...
Welcome VisibleBody.com
At today's meeting of the Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Tech Leaders Healthcare Cluster I learned about VisibleBody.com. Astounding visualization tool – like the old plastic Visible Man/Woman models of long ago. Pan, tilt, rotate, zoom. I can see this as a...
Ted Eytan’s Twitterview
"Ask your patients what they use, what they want to use, and how you can be there for them." -- Ted Eytan's advice to IT-reluctant health professionals in a Twitterview with Diario Médico.
Twitter, Facebook, and e-patients
Here is a key line from the Pew Internet Project's report on Twitter and status updating: Twitter users engage with news and own technology at the same rates as other internet users, but the ways in which they use the technology—to communicate, gather and share...
Raise Awareness of the Reality of Rare Disorders
Wendy White, Founder and President of Siren Interactive, contributes this essay: One in ten Americans is living with a rare disorder, but they are often overlooked in the media, in research circles, and in their local communities. The 2nd Annual Rare Disease Day on...
“Patients” vs. “Health Care Consumers”? Both, If You Ask AmyT
Amy Tenderich weighs in on the name debate: patient vs. consumer. Almost anything is better than cyberchondriac or medical googler, but e-patient is still my favorite.
The Wellsphere Blogging Controversy
You may have heard of the Wellsphere blogging controversy (if not, here's one take on the issue, and here's another from a different perspective). In a nutshell, Wellsphere went to bloggers in the health world and asked them if they could syndicate their blog entries...
Computers reduce odds of in-hospital deaths
This reinforces my repeated assertion that healthcare is far, far behind ordinary enterprise in adoption of practices that work: "When computers replace paper, patient mortality rates drop 15% during hospitalization, among other metrics, according to a study of 41...
The e-patient white paper: Seven Preliminary Conclusions
One year ago today I finished reading e-Patients: How they can help us heal healthcare, the e-patient white paper. It turned my head around because although I'd experienced excellent care in almost all ways, it showed that I as a patient have far more to contribute...
Clinical trials: Unfavorable results often go unpublished (Science Blog)
E-Patient Dave spotted an informative post on the Science Blog about an inherent shortcoming of the publication process: failed trials don't get published, so others don't have the chance to learn from them. His post about it here. (Where did he learn about it? In his...
Moving from “medicine as individual heroism” to “medicine as a team sport”
This topic isn't directly in our wheelhouse here in the e-patient movement ("empowered, engaged, equipped and enabled"), but as I continue one patient's odyssey in learning about healthcare, a discussion on Paul Levy's blog has taught me a lot. So I'm posting it for...
An e-patient call to arms
E-patients, this is a call to action. Now. I want you to go express yourself on Paul Levy's blog. Most readers of health policy blogs know what a costly, inefficient mess healthcare in America has become. Paul Levy would like the people in his business to work...