e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Making sense of health statistics
Cross-posted from my own blog, with a late p.s. from this morning's paper When John Grohol read my post the other day about evidence-based medicine, he steered me to a paper worth reading: Helping Doctors and Patients Make Sense of Health Statistics. (Update Dec 15...
Your Health Information at Your Fingertips
Nancy B. Finn is a journalist with an expertise in the implementation of digital communications in health care and shared this story about personal health records: I was recently hospitalized. Fortunately I did not have to go through the emergency department but was...
Confessions Yield Debate
David Kibbe's THCB post, Confessions of a Physician EMR Champion, has stirred debate in the comments section including some key insights from our own Gilles Frydman, who points out the need to add "patients" to the list of stakeholders, and Christine Gray, who writes...
Using Aggregate Data to Help Public Health
Public health is different than our personal health. Most people take for granted the role public health agencies play in our lives, but its primary emphasis is tracking disease data across the country in order to prevent a nationwide epidemic or pandemic. Nobody...
The Risks of Going All Digital
We constantly assume that writing the blogs posts is one of the ways to help shape the dialogue on medicine and healthcare reforms. I suppose that for many participants in this blog it has become a very serious occupation, one that they consider worth the effort, both...
Information Silos Are Everywhere. But So Is The Internet!
Information Silo:Â An information silo is a management system incapable of reciprocal operation with other, related management systems... "Information silo" is a pejorative expression that is useful for describing the absence of operational reciprocity. Derived...
Do Doctors Read?
Okay, after monitoring e-patients.net and The Health Care Blog, I have to ask: Do doctors read? And if so, what? I know four things from my own experience (and watching "Grey's Anatomy"). First, physicians are busy often exhausted individuals who deal with...
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...
