e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Crowd trumps credentials: Medpedia’s dead.
In medicine, to achieve the best you need the best information. So an essential question is, who gets to say what's best? That question took a sharp turn this week with the news that Medpedia is dead. Medical librarian Laika Spoetnik has a strong post on the demise,...
On the road to shared office visits
Guest blogger Peter Elias, MD describes his journey on opening up his office notes to patients. Peter is a family physician in active primary care practice since 1977, co-founder of a group practice now owned by a hospital-based multi specialty group, with a...
How e-Patients Plan for End of Life Decisions
Decades ago, most people died at home. Today health care technology including various surgical procedures, the use of feeding tubes, ventilators, CPR, dialysis, and blood transfusions, has put patients and physicians in the precarious position of having to choose...
“Stetho-Snopes”: MightyCasey calls for medical myth-busting
On Saturday I spotted the weekly top ten post from Snopes.com, the fabulous rumor-checking site, with the ten rumors that gave them the most activity last week. I thought "Man, I sure wish there was a site that reliable for medical information on the internet," and...
Caregivers: a celebration
Becoming a caregiver seems to change people as health information consumers. They turn up the volume on every information source. They track down information as if it is a competitive sport.* They don't let pay walls or office hours stand in their way. It's akin to...
Raw data now! Open science! Sign Ben Goldacre’s #AllTrials petition
Last year during TEDMED 2012, in “The cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine”: Ben Goldacre on the missing data, we covered the vitally important news that a lot of medical research has gone missing, leading to a severely corrupted foundation for evidence-based...
Are Physicians Truly Engaging with their Patients?
A recent report by CMS detailed statistics on how many health providers had actually received Meaningful Use (MU) incentive payments. As of March, 2013, 160,890 eligible professionals had received Medicare incentive payments and 83,765 professionals had received...
Cleveland Clinic To Give Patients Full Access to Data
Healthcare IT News posted a detailed story about how the Cleveland Clinic plans to roll out its new MyChart EMR to give patients complete access to their health records by the end of 2013. According to the article, the Cleveland Clinic believes this move is "the right...
Erin Moore: Are Patients a Distraction? I think not…
This guest post is from SPM member Erin Moore @ekeeleymoore and is reproduced from her blog, 66 Roses, which is dedicated to finding a cure for cystic fibrosis. There was a healthcare conference last fall that I desperately wanted to go to. The conference was for...
Lisanne St Onge Klute: The Power of Social Healthcare; Becoming an Empowered Patient and Surviving a Cavernous Malformation of the Brainstem
This guest post was written by Lisanne St. Onge Klute and originally appeared on The Story of iPatchman, a blog for e-patients with brain tumors. It is a great example of the power of social media for helping e-patients find the best treatment. Thanks to Akiva...
Blue Button Plus Challenge – Call for Patient Input
ONC is sponsoring the Blue Button Plus Challenge -- putting up some prize money to incentivize teams of developers to come up with solutions to the problem of getting patient data to patients. The first phase of the challenge is crowdsourcing ideas from patients about...
Patient-family advisors: “Don’t say you volunteer – say it’s pro bono”
Updated 6/4 in response to Tony's comment, described below. I'm speaking today at the fifth annual Patient & Family Centered Care conference, hosted by PFCC Partners in Long Beach, California. (They're not related to the similarly named IPFCC.) At today's lunch...