e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
WikiProject Medicine three years on: “converting clinicians to active digital contributors”
"To help inform patients of the best scientific knowledge..." “...as future physicians, they realize that part of their contract with society is to meet patients where they are and to help inform patients of the best of scientific knowledge about the conditions that...
WikiProject Medicine: med students join in producing high quality Wikipedia articles. (You can, too.)
I'm taking the extraordinary step of rerunning, verbatim, an entire post from 2014 about this important development. Why? Because tomorrow an update is coming, and to fully appreciate the news, you need to appreciate the background. Here's the original, from March 5,...
Lived Experience + Expertise = Value
Recently I connected a patient expert in insurance and provider billing with a patient at the tail end of chemo struggling with huge unexpected bills. I introduced a cancer survivor with web design skills to a patient advocate setting up a new blog. I linked a parent...
#BMJDebate tweetchat: “terms of engagement” for patient voices, noon Thursday ET
On Thursday, at 5pm UK time / noon ET / 9 am Pacific, the BMJ will host a tweetchat under their #BMJDebate hashtag, adding to the ongoing debate about how and when patients can be compensated for their contributions to improving healthcare. Please read editor Tessa...
Millenson in BMJ: When “patient centred” is no longer enough: the challenge of collaborative health
SPM past board member Michael Millenson has an important new commissioned essay in the BMJ spelling out some parameters of collaborative health, which might as well have been written as participatory medicine. Happily, they made it open access so patients can read it...
Webinar today, 11am ET: Increasing patient involvement in assessing new treatments
Short notice, but if you can join, please do - if you can't make it, the archive will be published. EUPATI (European Patients' Academy) has a 90 minute webinar today, July 5, at 11 am ET, 8 am PT, 5 pm Central Europe. To register click the graphic or click here. "HTA"...
What My 90-Year-Old Mom Taught Me About the Future of AI In Health Care (WBUR)
As his TEDMED profile says, Dr. Isaac (Zak) Kohane, MD, PhD, co-directs the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. He's a long-time believer in the power of well managed information to help create well managed care. Many members of SPM got into...
RIP: Larry Weed, MD the creator of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record
Lawrence “Larry” Weed (born December 1923, died June 3, 2017) was an American physician, researcher, educator, entrepreneur, and author, who is best known for creating the problem-oriented medical record as well as one of the first electronic health records....
“Amenable mortality”: how well 195 countries deliver existing cures (or don’t, so you die)
What would you think if your fire department had expensive, snazzy fire trucks that failed to show up when needed? What would you think if a neighboring town had less fancy equipment but was incredibly dependable about using what it had? That's pretty much the issue...
SPM member & husband try to get care from one of the “best systems in the world.” #Fails.
Sunnie Southern is an avid activist for better care, a proactive patient (very responsible), a long-time member of our Society for Participatory Medicine, and a good friend with an irrepressibly bright disposition. As I often say, "I've never seen anyone with a more...
Eric Topol: Landmark Digital Medicine Trial: Patient-Generated Data Improve Cancer Survival
Eric Topol published a Commentary on Medscape describing a study published in JAMA in which cancer patients that tracked 12 symptoms and shared the tracking results with their health teams had a five months increase in survival equivalent with some of the most...
From the UK: “Habits of an Improver”
We in the Society for Participatory Medicine are in many stages of awakening to our potential as active participants in the health system. Some have a particular focus on a disease or a technology; many of us come to it through our own experience (good or bad) as a...