e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
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...
How can we have informed patients, if hospitals won’t inform?
This post is prompted by a horrid subject: how do we as a society deal with one of the worst possible events – a death in our healthcare system? The immediate topic is a 37 year old woman who died last week at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). An article...
Placebos & the Doctor-Patient Relationship
As the BMJ noted in its survey of physicians' use of placebos this past week, the placebo effect is a powerful treatment. Judith Graham's "Triage" blog examines this phenomenon and reminds us that it's not the pill that's causing the effect, but the attention to...
A Glimpse of American Healthcare of the Future (My Talk at Health 2.0)
Thomas Jefferson had a radical notion: When the people are well-informed, they can be trusted to govern themselves. This powerful idea worked to end our rule by the King, but at the time it didn't apply to slaves; it didn't apply to women. It STILL doesn't apply to...
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...
“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...
