e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
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...
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...
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. Â The researchers created a "Patient Activation Measure" and apparently 41% of adults are...
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...
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...
