e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
Making Sense of “Patient-Centered Care”
The Journal of Participatory Medicine received a nice recommendation from Paul Levy, former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in his blogpost on where to find reliable information about patient-centered medicine. Levy also recommends a new non-profit site...
Globe article on EMRs: status and the safety issue
In today's Boston Globe, the cover story for the daily "G" magazine is "Record-Keeping 2.0," by Chelsea Conaboy (@cconaboy). Subtitled "Medical care is shifting to electronic data files - but how safe is it?", it's a good mass-market introduction to the subject and...
Let’s Get Medical Info as Good as Our Pets Get! — A Petition
SPM member Ken Farbstein sent us this invitation to help persuade the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology to include printed summaries of doctor visits in the ONC's definition of meaningful use. After our pets go to the veterinarian,...
AHRQ Cancer Resources to Help Understand Treatment Options
From Nadia Dawson at Ogilvy, the PR firm that's handling AHRQ (the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality) - ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Nadia Dawson Date: Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 6:34 PM Subject: Cancer Resources to Help Understand Treatment...
Applying Tom Gilbert’s performance improvement framework to the “compliance” issue
I participated today in a webinar  hosted by eHI. My slides arrived (ahem) too late to be broadcast, so I posted them online, with comments, on my site. In case you don't click through to the whole thing, here's a quick excerpt: Long ago in another career I learned...
Technology Enables Collaborative Doctor-Patient Relationships
SPM member and Bay Area writer Eve Harris looks at information technology's role in promoting participatory medicine on KQED's State of Health blog. Harris discusses tools familiar to most e-patients, but what's really noteworthy here is the evidence that more...
Gangadhar Sulkunte: TEDMED 2012 Highlights
For those who didn't make it to TEDMED 2012, here's a brief overview of sessions of interest to e-patients, from SPM member Gangadhar Sulkunte. This originally appeared on his blog. Also noteworthy was TEDMED's acceptance of "The Role of the Patient." as on of its...
SPM Tweetchat last night: Patients at conferences
From SPM communication team leader Ileana Balcu: Lisa Fields @PracticalWisdom hosted an wonderful chat last night on the topic of patient presence at conferences. Lisa was a great host and we had a record number of paticipants. Please skim through the transcript on...
Regina Holliday in Newsweek (Shannon Brownlee on hurried docs and lack of care)
What news to wake up to - SPM's "resident artist" Regina Holliday is in Newsweek. It's not a happy story - nothing about her story is - but it's good to see such things getting the visibility they deserve. The article, by Overtreated author Shannon Brownlee, is The...
“The cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine”: Ben Goldacre on the missing data
Updates: The text below the video was added later on 4/17, and the graphic was added 4/18. For me the evidence highlight of TEDMED last week was a talk by Ben Goldacre MD (@BenGoldacre), a charming and articulate doctor who's dug deeply into what seems to be...
Patient Engagement shows up big in special WSJ section on Healthcare Innovations
Thanks to SPM co-founder Joe Graedon of PeoplesPharmacy.com for this note about today's special section in the Wall Street Journal on healthcare innovation. (Some of the content requires a subscription, but you can register for 8 weeks free.) Joe's note, with...
Regina Holliday / Ted Eytan interview: StoryCorps audio, now in the Library of Congress
One of the best-known sad stories in the e-patient movement is that of SPM member Regina Holliday, her husband Fred, and their two children. Fred died three years ago of kidney cancer in a series of failures of American healthcare, leaving a story that Regina now...