e-Patients Blog
The blog of the Society for Participatory Medicine. Want to be a contributor?
OpenNotes helps me prep for a visit
My annual physical is this Friday. Â Since my doctor and I were among the guinea pigs participants in the OpenNotes project, I just got this reminder email: Message Date/Time:Â 1/17/2012 10:00:06 AM Read Date/Time:Â 1/18/2012 7:19:08 AM From:Â OpenNotes, Study...
MIT Media Lab’s Health & Wellness 2012: ten day innovation fest, six us-centered projects
Updated 9:38pm ET - fixed many broken links :-/ I'm spending today (ONLY today, unfortunately) at the MIT Media Lab's third annual Health & Wellness Innovation event. Â It's a two week competition - six teams pursuing some terrific ideas for the most...
Pauline Chen: Getting Patients to Take Charge of Their Health
Quick note as I run to the airport - Last May we reported on a study in process at Emory University about whether a "safety-net" (poor) population would engage with a personal health record. The preliminary results in that poster showed that what predicted patient...
Open knowledge saves lives. Oppose H.R. 3699!
Note: Although currently not a member of the SPM, I have been involved, since its inception, with Tom Ferguson and others, in the creation of the e-patients white paper . I am also one of the co-founders of the SPM and one of the volunteers who created the...
Gloucester Times: Taking control of our own care in today’s health maze
Jessie Gruman’s “Lessons from the Year of Living Sick-ishly”
Regular readers know that last year Jessie Gruman of the Center for Advancing Health was treated for her fourth cancer. (Knock it off, willya??) (Diagnosis post here...
JoPM: A Doctor’s Remedy for Long Waits
A new article in the Journal of Participatory Medicine tackles the problem of long wait times at doctors' offices, a leading cause of patient dissatisfaction. "Waiting Room Remedy: Doctor Pays for Delays (The Doctor's Perspective)" by Pamela Wible, MD offers a...
HBR blog: “The trouble with treating patients as consumers”
Edited a few minutes after the original post. Over on the Harvard Business Review blog a post yesterday is stirring up discussion. I hope well-informed SPM members can help shed some light in the comments there, citing as many specifics as you can. (As I compiled the...
Ileana Balcu: The marriage of HIT with quality, transparency and cooperation between patients and doctors
In the latest post in our Why I Joined SPM series, guest blogger Ileana Balcu shares her story of pain, searching, and finally healing, once she discovered the e-patient community. Follow her on Twitter at @yogileana. It was 2002 and I was happily pregnant. I thought...
GeekDoctor’s wife, newly diagnosed, gives Cancer 101’s Cancer Planner high marks
I just learned that the organization of SPM president-elect Sarah Krug, Cancer 101, has gotten what I consider a major acknowledgement. On his blog GeekDoctor.blogspot.com, John Halamka announced last month that his wife Kathy was newly diagnosed with breast cancer....
Star Tribune: Simple pharmacy change produces major quality improvement
We often note here that quality improvement in hospitals seems excruciatingly slow to happen, and engaged patients and families need to keep their eyes wide open, because sometimes a fix doesn't require being a genius. For instance, see the cartoon at right - from...
New Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine
From SPM member Ileana Balcu - A post that might be of interest to our group – about the importance of diagnosis – from a former president of Society of General Internal Medicine, Robert Centor. http://www.medrants.com/archives/6639 It includes a link to the Society...