e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Sips with the Society: SPM Receptions at Health 2.0 and Connected Health Summit
As the sweet days of summer 2016 start to wane, it's time to make plans to attend key fall conferences. This year, the Society for Participatory Medicine is hosting Sips With The Society - meet and great receptions at Health 2.0 in Santa Clara and the Connected Health...
OpenNotes hits TEN MILLION patient level
As regular readers know, for years we've been blogging here about OpenNotes, in which patients and their designated caregivers can read every word their clinicians write, so they can be more informed. The OpenNotes tagline, "Doctors and patients on the same page," is...
How can we cope with uncertainty?
We've written often about uncertainty, which is a recurring challenge in medicine and especially in participatory medicine, where issues of relationship and decisions are core. Some doctors have told me they were trained to display certainty even when things aren't...
e-Patients as journal authors: Sean Ahrens self-experiment published in a major journal
We'd love to start a list of other patient-authored papers and posters - let us know in the comments! We know of Dana M. Lewis & Scott Leibrand's poster about #OpenAPS in June - who else?? We've written before about e-patient Sean Ahrens and the Crohnology...
Cleo Kordomenos: How My Opinion on Online Health Communities Changed
This is a guest blog post by Cleo Kordomenos. Cleo was my student in the New Media and Health Communication class I taught at TCNJ. More about the class is shared in this post. Cleo Kordomenos is a Senior Communication Studies student at The College of New Jersey...
“Unmarried teens would jump off bridges”: NY Times on suppression of home tests
A large part of the Society for Participatory Medicine's work is culture change, and that requires pointing to the cultural roots of today's situation, so that well-meaning people today can understand how we got here, and how absurd today will look in the future. I've...
Teaching Health Communication with Participatory Medicine Highlights
In the Spring of 2016 I had the opportunity to teach the course New Media and Health Communication for an undergraduate class at The College of New Jersey. The class, designed by Dr. Yifeng Hu, already included an introduction to participatory medicine and patient...
New data from CMS insurance claims will empower consumer choice
A patient's ability to choose the provider they want depends largely on information - same as any other choice, right? So this blog has long praised The Leapfrog Group for its deep analysis and publication of hospital quality and safety data, through its Hospital...
Health 2.0: first conference to offer Patient Activist awards. Vote!
Voting ends Sunday July 31 Patient activists who attend conferences know that it's been a long climb to get patient voices welcomed. The #PatientsIncluded movement has been around for years, making small dents, but Health 2.0 is one of the best:Â while they don't...
Peter Elias: a physician experiences a portal from the family side, and… #fail
Peter Elias MD (in photo at left) is a member-at-large on the board of our Society for Participatory Medicine. See his earlier posts here. Particularly relevant is his Proposal for a TRULY patient-centered medical record, The experience he recounts here, as a...
“Sister” Organization! AACH: American Academy of Communication in Healthcare
SPM member Danny van Leeuwen is @HealthHats on Twitter. Last week I attended the American Academy of Communication in Healthcare (AACH) Conference in New Haven – 2016 ENRICH Healthcare Communication Course and Research Forum at Yale, entitled, Diverse Voices, Common...
In our journal: exploration of gardening to foster engagement in stroke patients
A new article in our Journal of Participatory Medicine explores an area that apparently has had no prior literature: the effect of gardening on how well stroke patients engage in their care. From the abstract: Five main themes were identified from interviews and...