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e-Patients Blog

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Connected Health Symposium 2008

An East Coast contingent of the e-patients group will be in Boston on Monday and Tuesday, speaking and listening at the Connected Health symposium. I'm going to present the Pew Internet Project's latest data on social media and how the participatory Web is creating...

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“How to Take American Health Care From Worst to First”

What do we think of THIS?? An op-ed piece in the NY Times:Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland Athletics, suggests using baseball-style number-crunching to improve healthcare, with Newt Gingrich and John Kerry co-authoring the piece. Some snips: "Remarkably, a doctor today...

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Quality of Care & e-Patients

JAMA has an interesting Patient Page on quality of care. The definitions of e-Patients and Participatory Medicine mention or point to quality of care. Are we talking about the same thing? NOT AT ALL! If the patient page of JAMA represents the official position of the...

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41% of Adults are “Activated Patients”

41% of Adults are “Activated Patients”

The Center for Studying Health System Change has released another information-packed report, How Engaged Are Consumers in Their Health and Health Care, and Why Does It Matter.   The researchers created a "Patient Activation Measure" and apparently 41% of adults are...

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All MRIs Are Not Created Equal

Gina Kolata's must-read article, "The Scan That Didn't Scan," in last week's Science Times points out vast differences in the quality of MRIs as well as vast differences in the expertise of the radiologists who interpret them. Patients need to understand this, because...

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Overtreatment – sometimes against our will

Here's an unpleasant aspect of patient empowerment: we need to be aware that sometimes our providers will heap treatments on us that aren't necessary - and, sometimes, treatments we've specifically said we don't want. Paul Grundy MD, chair of PCPCC, had this happen...

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One Doctor’s Prescription for Fixing U.S. Healthcare

John Grohol initially posted this in our "Found on the Net" sidebar, but I clicked through, and I think it's important enough that it belongs as a main post.  (Short doesn't imply sidebar.) I'm particularly drawn to "equal rights for physicians," something my gut has...

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Extending Your Healthcare Dollar

50 Ways To Squeeze Value From Your Healthcare Dollar Without Killing Yourself. An interesting list from one of the main websites specialized in frugal living. There is not much about patient empowerment but there are many interesting bits of advice. The comments...

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Learning from medical errors

As an empowered patient I'm willing to go to the ends of the earth to help the medical community get beyond the famed "culture of blame," so everyone involved can learn from errors. Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center had a wrong site incident, and responded...

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Crowdsourcing the Definition of Participatory Medicine

"Crowdsourcing: the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call." Jeff Howe Or in other words Participatory Outsourcing. There is clearly a growing...

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Blogging to Save a Father’s Life

Yesterday, RocketBoom founder Andrew Baron took to the blogosphere to round up support in his efforts to get a rare drug approved for use in treating his father. His father was diagnosed with a very bad form of cancer called multiple myeloma and his dad's doctor...

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The Society for Participatory Medicine’s ePatients blog highlights items of interest to those in the world of e-patients and participatory medicine. Some of our most popular topics include e-patient stories, e-patient resources, problems in healthcare, medical records, news & gossip, patient networks, policy issues, positive patterns, patient/doctor co-care, patients as teachers, reforming healthcare, trends & principles, and why participatory medicine. Our newest blog posts are below. You can also subscribe to our blog via email.

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