e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
History lesson! “LINC with Tomorrow”: Warner Slack on “educational TV,” 1967
The much-quoted line "Patients are the most under-used resource in healthcare" was first uttered in the 1970s by Warner Slack, MD, when he was a young doctor in Madison, Wisconsin. It's seen many versions and incarnations since then, but...
Person-Centered #CarePlanning – What data?
Last month, in Communicate What? #CarePlanning, I declared the #CarePlanning hashtag, and told from personal experience the importance of communication in enabling participatory care. I ended with this - my perspective as the person who has the problem and the...
The S’mores Circle
This time of the year is often filled with reflection and a retrospective review of our lives with a focus on lifestyle changes we hope to attain in the New Year. It’s a time where regrets can be erased by future aspirations. Many of us set resolutions, which I...
Communicate What? #CarePlanning
I want to share a family story and show how it connects to something we'll all face, where real participatory thinking - and communication - make all the difference. My wife and I built a house together - the whole house, everything except drilling the well. While...
Thanksgiving Letter to my Doctor
Coming from Romania 15 years ago, Thanksgiving was not a big thing for me. I didn’t quite grasp the holiday. My husband cooked and celebrated, and I helped and observed it in a detached way. 11 years ago, it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I was 22 weeks...
A first: Participatory Medicine thinking in the Harvard Business Review
As kindlers and promoters of a social movement, our Society for Participatory Medicine keeps a keen eye out for signs of traction in credible places for what we've been advocating since 2009: Participatory Medicine is a model of cooperative health care that seeks to...
OpenID HEART: Sharing our data gives patients power
On September 26, 2016, President Obama recognized Health IT Week by saying: We have worked to clarify an individual’s legal right to access their health information and transmit it where they choose—whether it’s to a family member or to their smartphone. These efforts...
NEJM Data Analysis Challenge: can others create value by seeing researchers’ data?
This is big. Please share it with anyone you know who's a believer in open data. You may have heard that back in January the New England Journal of Medicine created a firestorm by saying "parasites" about people who want to see a researcher's original data. Many...
Participatory Medicine Learning Exchange: How Are We Moving the Needle?
We are each individually advancing the participatory medicine movement in our day-to-day lives and interfaces with healthcare and/or our work. Understanding the work we are conducting within our individual silos can help us learn from one another, allow us to build...
Why We Are Losing the Battle Against Infectious Disease
Antibiotics and similar drugs, called antimicrobial agents, have been used successfully for the last 70 years to treat patients who have infectious diseases. However, these drugs have been used so widely and for so long, that the infectious organisms the antibiotics...
Imagine if You Could Cut Through the Clutter With a Health GPS
Spearheaded by Vice President Joseph Biden, the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force was created to double the rate of progress in cancer research and treatment, striving to accelerate what could be achieved in ten years in just five. Earlier this week, Vice...
We’re partnering to support The Big Heist!
The Society of Participatory Medicine (SPM) is excited to announce that we're partnering with The Big Heist to accelerate building a Health 3.0 world, where patients actively participate and are empowered to control and improve their care. The Big Heist will be a...
