e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Crowdsourcing a Survey: Health Topics
The Pew Internet Project will conduct a national telephone survey this fall about the internet’s impact on health and health care. One of the first tasks is to look at our tried and true “trend” questions and decide which ones we should repeat as is and which ones need to be updated. Since I benefit […]
Please vote for GlobalCures
Update: voting ends midnight EDT Monday 9/29. Great post Friday on John Halamka’s GeekDoctor blog. It’s about GlobalCures, an entry in MembersProject, an American Express contest that has $2.5 million in prizes for proposals to make a positive change in the world. 1190 proposals have winnowed down – through popular vote – to 25 semifinalists; […]
The Im-Patient Consumer
Josh Seidman has a new entrant in the health care name game: The Im-Patient Consumer. As he explains, “Americans for the most part are too [expletive of choice] patient with the absurd care that they get for more than $2 trillion a year.” Please consider supporting the Society by joining us today! Thank you.
Cognitive Surplus & Tough Economic Times: An Explosive Cocktail?
The growth of the e-Patients movement may be experiencing surprising strength from a completely unexpected source, with many people growing the ranks of the movement because of the greatest motivator of all: saving money. Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus observation, made in April 2008, keeps on resonating as I see more and more evidence that, contrarily […]
Dr. Val Jones Leaves Revolution
Although not explicitly mentioned, it appears Dr. Val Jones, the Senior Medical Director at Revolution Health, has quietly left the company and is starting her own venture, Better Health. You can read an interview where she discusses her new life online, with not a single mention of her 2+ year efforts at Revolution. Rumor has it that Revolution actually terminated most of its relationships with medical staff, moving highly paid doctors like Dr. Val from full-time to a consulting role only. Glad to see her move on with her own “brand” and venturing out on her own!
Pareto’s Tyranny vs. the Paradox of Rarity: Why ACOR succeeded
Why have rare diseases been so disproportionally represented in the online medical communities since we started creating these resources in the early 90s? Could the Pareto Principle be responsible for this unusual finding?
For Sale: Revolution Health
Why is Steve Case’s online health venture already looking to sell itself, just a year and a half after it launched? Yet another tale of hubris in the e-health sector. Please consider supporting the Society by joining us today! Thank you.
Cloud computing puts your health data at risk?
In today’s
Windows Secrets, Stuart Johnston writes about the pros and cons of having our health data out on the Internet, as proposed by Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. Quotes: “Selling prescription records is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry”; “Disclosure of health information is [already] out of control.” Yikes?
e-patients: How they can help us heal healthcare, chapter 1
e-Patient Dave joined this group in March 2008 thanks to an introduction by Danny Sands, MD, his primary care physician. Dave quickly established himself as the number one fan of the “white paper,” which we had edited and published after Tom Ferguson’s death. On his home blog, The New Life of e-Patient Dave, he noted […]
Healthcare Quality Movement conference in Boston
Please read these quick posts being submitted in real time from an event today. Contains much important (to me) info on what’s going on to improve healthcare. Every e-patient advocate should be aware of this, I think. For instance I never heard of the 1999 report “To Err Is Human,” which it seems we should […]
Nexthealth: a picture worth a thousand words
Jen McCabe Gorman drew a picture at HealthCampDC on Friday that I really liked. Luckily, I found this image of her Medicine 2.0 presentation, so nobody has to decipher my sketch. Click image to view full size original. The one difference is that, on Friday, Jen pointed out that the outer square (“content”) is Health […]
Participatory Medicine at NIH, part 2
The National Institutes of Health recently gathered a group of consumers and people who study them. We met off-site at a hotel in Bethesda, which I thought was an apt metaphor for the day’s question: How can NIH better communicate with the public? First, I said, make it easier to access your research. Make your […]