e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Happy Dogs in a Pile of Sticks (Spreading Improvement in Chronic Disease Care)
The California HealthCare Foundation's Chronic Disease Care conference was so packed with great panels that I needed help choosing my targets. Here is the first in a series of posts about this event. Spreading Improvement: After the Innovators/Early Adopters Hunter...
How Good Are Doctor Rating Sites?
Ruth Given has written a paper entitled, MD Rating Websites: Current State of the Space and Future Prospects (PDF), that was recently published on THCB. It's a 39-page informal analysis (with an emphasis placed on informal) that takes a fairly good and comprehensive...
Patient Involvement Makes People Smile
Ted Eytan's Photo Friday features a crowd of chronic disease care providers listening to patients tell their stories -- and smiling as they see the impact of what they do. As I wrote in the comments, I'll post here soon with more notes, but this photo is a good start...
In the Spin: Death by Referral
In October I recounted how my daughter was put through a spin cycle of referrals and medical misdiagnosis that nearly got her killed. The lump on her forearm that looked like a cyst was instead a deadly cancer. The nightmare began at the local radiology practice,...
Crowdsourcing a Survey: Reassured? Overwhelmed? Eager? Confused?
The Pew Internet Project is finalizing our fall health survey and we are now in the painful cut phase. Here's a question I'm hoping to save in a shorter form: At any point in your last search for health information online did you feel any of the following things? At...
Can you say “Ludique”?
Everybody can say this simple French word. Ludique Definition:Â (adj) related to games, playful, recreational Could it be what's missing from many of the health & wellness Health 2.0 applications I have seen so far? Why would that be important? Last I wrote about...
Participatory Medicine: Text of my speech at the Connected Health symposium
I should have posted this when I posted my slides, but better late than never. Remarks by Susannah Fox of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project at the Connected Health symposium in Boston, MA, on October 27, 2008. The Pew Internet Project...
When a doctor is a patient: experiencing a medical error
From Judith Graham's healthcare blog at the Chicago Tribune: "Doctors often describe a sense of shock when they experience the medical system from a patient's perspective. A gripping account of this phenomenon comes from Janice M. Scully, a Virginia internist who...
Help Me Choose: Sessions at the Chronic Disease Care Conference
I will be heading to San Francisco this week to attend the Chronic Disease Care conference sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation. Registration is closed but I promise to take notes on as many panels as possible. Please help me choose from the smorgasbord...
Health 2.0 & The Widening Digital Divide: A Call to Action
Too many years witnessing the same thing. First in the ACOR system. Then in many conferences about eHealth, e-Patients and now Health 2.0 and the Connected Health symposium at Harvard Medical School. Why is an entire segment of the US population almost completely...
Participatory Medicine, Connected Health
The Center for Connected Health's 2008 Symposium was held in Boston on October 27-28, 2008. I gave a talk entitled, "Participatory Medicine: How User-Generated Media are Changing American Attitudes and Actions, Online and Off." As always, the conversations I had with...
Wall Street Journal goes e-Patient
Where have we heard this story before? A friend of mine slipped on the sidewalk recently and broke her hip. She had surgery in one of the best hospitals in the country. But it [wasn't their staff, it] was her grown daughter who noticed that she was having an adverse...